Moderation Is Toast of ‘90s in California

As Christmas parties go, the bash the other night by one of this town’s biggest public relations firms was among the most elaborate.

The rock band, loud and tight, was shoehorned next to a tiny forest of flocked trees. Hired dancers in fishnet stockings gyrated in unison while the sparkling ice sculpture, surrounded by food-laden tables, slowly dripped into oblivion. And, of course, there was an open bar.

Years ago, that last item would have been of particular interest to James Grenz, then a hard-drinking union ironworker in the construction industry. But not anymore.

There he stood with his wife Susan, sipping a glass of wine, one of only two he would have all night. “I had an hour’s drive home. I definitely was not going to leave . . . with a blood alcohol level that would put me in jeopardy,” Grenz, 50, said a few days later. “In my 30s, I became more socially conscious about drinking and driving and the potential of actually hurting someone.”

Grenz’s moderated drinking habits, mirrored by imbibers across the state, have translated into a 79-million-gallon decline in California’s annual alcohol consumption over the past decade--enough to fill 3,160 standard swimming pools. The trend offers holiday cheer to health and public safety advocates and has caused beer, wine and liquor marketers to rethink their strategies.

But some experts believe that the slide is reaching an end, and that an explosion in the number of drinking-age youths is just around the corner as the sons and daughters of baby boomers come of age.

As the Christmas to New Year’s Eve party season reaches its peak, Californians are consuming 36% less wine per person, 34% less hard liquor and 21% less beer, even as the state’s population has steadily grown, according to figures from the Board of Equalization for 1987-88 to 1997-98. The agency’s findings are based on excise tax collections paid by beverage manufacturers.

“I think there has been a cultural change regarding how people look at alcohol,” said Harvey Chinn, legislative director for the California Council on Alcohol Problems, a group that works against alcohol use.

The powerful mix of interlinked factors driving down alcohol consumption includes the rising importance of a healthful lifestyle, fitness and proper diet--an ethos particularly embraced in California and by aging baby boomers everywhere who once partook freely.

Older and wiser, Elaine Corn, now in her late 40s, can vividly remember the excesses of a youth in Kentucky and Texas when she was a happy participant in the singles bar scene.

“When I drank a lot in my early 20s, I’d sometimes wake up in the morning and smell scotch coming out of my pores,” said Corn, today a mellowed Sacramento restaurant owner, wife and mother. With age came new responsibilities and a refinement in lifestyle that includes just a few glasses of good wine a week, she said.

California helped by dropping the blood alcohol content level required for a drunk-driving conviction from 0.10% to 0.08% in 1990, one of 17 states to do so. The penalties for driving under the influence have been stiffened, including laws that allow police to confiscate driver’s licenses on the spot. Roadside sobriety checkpoints are common.

The state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control has tightened enforcement of laws prohibiting sales to minors. It has put bartenders on notice about the legal and licensing perils of serving drinks to intoxicated customers. And the courts have weighed in, ruling that private party hosts and bar owners can be liable for injuries caused by drunken guests.

Taken together, the cultural, governmental and societal transformation is a giant wet blanket that has dampened consumption.

“The reduction is part of a much greater social awareness that has been built around drunk driving and is moderating the behavior of adults,” said Jim Mosher, senior policy advisor at the Marin Institute for the Prevention of Alcohol and Other Drug Problems, in San Rafael. “The three-martini lunch is no longer part of the picture.”

The impact of lowered consumption is well documented. The number of people killed in state vehicle accidents involving alcohol dropped from 2,510 in 1988 to 1,072 in 1998, according to the California Highway Patrol. That is the lowest number since 1959, when there were only 40% of the about 21 million drivers today.

The number of people injured in such accidents also declined sharply, from 65,033 to 30,985. And there has been a 31% decline in drunk-driving arrests by the CHP, to the lowest total since 1970.

“When the law began to take drunk driving seriously, the people began to take the law seriously,” said Evan Nossoff, a spokesman for the Department of Motor Vehicles. “We have reversed a trend . . . but we are still concerned that 1,100 died 1/8in 1997 3/8. That’s still an epidemic, and they are preventable deaths.”

To be sure, alcohol is still associated with nearly 40% of violent crime in the United States, according to a U.S. Justice Department report, and 108,000 deaths each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism estimated in the early 1990s that about 14 million Americans met the criteria for alcohol abuse or dependence.

Thomas Greenfield, director of the National Alcohol Research Center on the Epidemiology of Alcohol Problems in Berkeley, contends that most problems are concentrated among a small group of drinkers who abuse alcohol. About 10% of American drinkers, mostly young men, account for almost 60% of the alcohol industry’s market, Greenfield said.

“The general impression is that most alcohol is drunk responsibly, which is true, because most people are drinking smaller amounts,” he said. “But what goes unnoticed is that the industry is highly dependent on the heavy-drinking consumers.”

Latinos and African Americans have not shared in the decline in heavy drinking, defined as five or more drinks a day, he said.

“Sometimes I drink to excess and sometimes I don’t drink anything,” said Joseph Heflin, a 57-year-old African American and retired Air Force veteran, as he sat on a bar stool in the dark comfort of Sacramento’s tidy Torch Club.

With a just-emptied shot glass in front of him on the bar, Heflin said he drinks about four times a week at the club, and when he is in “excess” mode he will have six or seven vodkas straight up.

Despite the overall downturn in consumption, the fiercely competitive alcohol industry remains healthy. Wine and beer sales are up; liquor sales are stable.

“People are drinking less but drinking better,” said John De Luca, president of the Wine Institute, the industry trade organization in San Francisco. The industry has undergone a metamorphosis since the mid-1980s, from cheaper generic wines and wine coolers to much higher-priced--and more profitable--premium varietal wines.

That has translated into a boom in sales, which rose from $11.7 billion in 1990 to $17 billion last year. “Just adding up the gallons 1/8consumed 3/8 doesn’t tell the true story of wine,” De Luca said. “The data shows that the wine consumer is exercising more, doesn’t smoke, likes to eat out, travel and in general has a healthy lifestyle.”

And is willing to pay top dollar for fruit of the vine. Wine by the glass, for example, is now a $1-billion-a-year industry.

The liquor industry has followed the wine industry’s formula of promoting higher-priced premium brands, including, for the first time, airing television ads. After years of decline, liquor sales have stabilized in the last three years, said Judy Blatman, spokeswoman for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, the liquor industry’s Washington-based trade group.

The beer industry, which has seen slight increases in its sales in the last few years, is by far the alcohol giant, with about 88% of the market. Jeff Becker, president of the Beer Institute, the industry’s trade organization in Washington, said his group believes the consumption decline is due mainly to excise tax increases and California’s recession, both during the early 1990s.

Statistics for the last few years show a leveling off of the years-long decline. Many experts believe a new generation of drinking-age youth, the sons and daughters of baby boomers, could boost drinking rates as early as next year. Some analysts estimate that these new alcohol consumers will increase the demand for beer, for example, by 2% to 6.5% a year.

The “baby boom echo” worries people like Manny Espinoza, chief deputy director of the state’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. “We’re looking at about a third more people of drinking age in the long term,” Espinoza said. “This is really going to challenge our resources, depending on their drinking patterns.”

Ruth Engs, an Indiana University professor who has studied the link between alcohol consumption and health reform cycles, says an increase in drinking in the new millennium is to be expected based on historic trends.

Engs’ research shows that roughly every 80 years since the 1800s, there have been crusades to restrict drinking and tobacco, which eventually peak. The current cycle, which Engs believes began in the 1970s with the rising influence of the religious right, is nearing its end. She predicts drinking will increase beginning in 2010 and peak by 2040.

“There are those who come on the scene who want to clean up the ills of society,” Engs said. But after a while, she said, “society is not as concerned, and it moves on.”

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Drink Less

Per capita yearly consumption in gallons

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State population

1987-88: 27.9 million

1997-98: 33.3 million

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Total consumption in millions of gallons

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State Rankings

1998 per capita consumption of alcohol based on current drinkers in the drinking-age population.

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Sources: state Board of Equalization, Alcohol Research Information Service, based on data

from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.