Statement of the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA)
For the Subcommittee on Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
September 30, 2003

The Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) is a nonprofit association whose members administer federal highway safety grant programs, including those that are aimed at reducing underage drinking and driving. Although underage drinking and driving is only one facet of the complex underage drinking issue, it is a serious and costly problem for the country and a priority for the organization. GHSA has received federal grants from both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to develop materials and training on underage drinking.

Significant progress has been made in underage drinking and driving over the last twenty years, largely due to the 1984 enactment of the National Minimum Drinking Age law. Nonetheless, young drivers are still being killed in motor vehicle crashes at an unacceptable rate. According to NHTSA, 17 percent of all underage drivers in fatal crashes were intoxicated and 24 percent of young drivers killed in fatal crashes in 2002 were intoxicated. Further, 69 percent of young drinking drivers involved in fatal crashes were unrestrained, and 77 percent of those drinking and killed in crashes were unrestrained. Clearly there is much work to be done to prevent this unnecessary loss of young life.

GHSA firmly believes that the problem of underage drinking and driving must be addressed as part of a comprehensive approach to underage drinking. The National Academy of Sciences recently released report, "Preventing and Reducing Underage Drinking," advocates such an approach, and GHSA strongly supports it. We believe that the NAS report is a landmark study that lays out the blueprint for future action on underage drinking. Implementation of the report will take a concerted, coordinated effort by all levels of government as well as considerably more resources from the federal and state governments and the alcohol industry.

GHSA also supports a number of specific recommendations in the NAS report.

We laud the recommendation that federal agencies form an interagency committee to coordinate their efforts on underage drinking. Different federal agencies approach the problem of underage drinking differently, and there is little coordination between them. These agencies have working relationships with different state agencies, but there is no attempt to develop a comprehensive approach at the state level. For example, state highway safety agencies are eligible to use their NHTSA impaired driving grants for underage drinking programs. OJJDP funds state programs aimed at enforcing underage drinking laws. Some state highway safety offices are grant recipients, but so are state criminal justice and health agencies. The Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) directs funds to state substance abuse agencies for underage drinking prevention. The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism conducts research on underage drinking but disseminates the results largely to the prevention and health communities. The Center for Injury Prevention and Research of the Centers for Disease Control conducts research on impaired driving and disseminates the results to the public health and highway safety communities but not necessarily to the law enforcement community. If the federal government took a leadership role on this issue and developed a coordinated approach, then it is more likely that the states would respond in a similar manner.

Another recommendation that GHSA strongly supports is the one calling for community interventions. The NAS report recommends that community leaders assess the underage drinking program in their communities and consider effective approaches to reducing underage drinking. GHSA was fortunate to receive a grant from NHTSA to develop a pilot project on underage drinking prevention. GHSA identified six communities and worked with their existing coalitions to assess their underage drinking problems and develop strategic plans for addressing the problems. Out of the pilot project, eight underage drinking guidebooks (on topics similar to those recommended by NAS) and one resource book was produced, and a training program was developed. (The guidebooks may be accessed on NHTSA's website, www.nhtsa.dot.gov/injury/alcohol. Click on youth and then on "Community How to Guides on Underage Drinking Prevention.") The guidebooks have been so popular with community organizations that NHTSA is on its third printing of them. Unfortunately, however, NHTSA did not have the resources to continue the community intervention effort and the pilot project has languished.

We believe that a community-level approach to underage drinking is critical and have proven successful in the prevention and criminal justice fields. (The Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, for example, has developed a Model Communities program which has been thoroughly evaluated and found successful.) Once a community has recognized the need to address the issue and put the resources and institutional infrastructure in place to address it, then there is a higher likelihood that underage drinking will be reduced and will remain reduced after federal funding has disappeared. GHSA strongly urges this Committee to consider funding community intervention efforts such as the one developed by GHSA

Restricting access to alcohol is an area with which GHSA members are very familiar since they provide the leadership on underage drinking legislation and enforcement and on education programs about the legislation and enforcement. Therefore, the NAS recommendations on access are ones which the Association strongly supports. State highway safety offices use federal highway safety grants to fund sobriety checkpoints and saturation patrols (for those states constitutionally prohibited from conducting checkpoints), enforcement of zero tolerance laws, compliance checks, server training, programs to discourage adults from providing minors with alcohol, and educational programs to discourage underage purchase of alcohol.

GHSA members have also been very supportive of graduated licensing laws: thirty-eight states now have these very effective laws. The Association has encouraged its members to review existing graduated licensing laws and strengthen them by restricting the number of underage passengers and by enacting nighttime driving curfews. Our proposal for reauthorization of the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) would provide incentives to states that enhance their graduated licensing laws, among other actions.

GHSA also supports keg registration and dram shop laws, and many state highway safety agencies have provided information that has helped legislatures enact these laws. In addition, GHSA members have been supportive of state efforts to modify existing laws to allow passive alcohol testing since research has shown that these low-cost devices are very effective in providing a preliminary indication of a drunk driver.

There is one access issue in the NAS report that has not gotten much attention: the issue of Internet alcohol sales and home delivery. According to the report, surveys show that 10 percent of young people report obtaining alcohol through the Internet or home delivery and that this percentage is likely to grow. This direct shipment effectively puts the delivery person in the role of having to screen for underage access, thereby eliminating the state alcohol beverage control systems and reducing accountability. The panel indicated that a case can be made to ban this type of sale and GHSA believes that this should be explored further. We are concerned that, as the federal government and others work to curtail underage access through current channels, another door not be opened through the Internet and home deliveries. The issue deserves increased attention by the Committee.

GHSA also supports the NAS recommendations on youth-oriented interventions. The Association concurs that only evidence-based youth-focused education programs should be funded. As noted previously, however, not enough is being done at the federal level to ensure that the research results are being disseminated to all agencies - including state highway safety agencies -- with a responsibility for underage drinking prevention.

GHSA is pleased that NAS has recommended a comprehensive approach to college-based interventions - an idea that fits nicely with its community-level intervention recommendation and with the GHSA underage drinking prevention pilots. The Association concurs that college interventions should also be carefully evaluated and a list of evidence-based programs published. At the same time, it is important not to discard potentially effective programs based on limited research findings. College age "social norming" is a case in point. Under this approach, colleges seek to create a new campus social norm around the positive behavior of students who drink moderately or not at all. A recent report by the Harvard School of Public Health cast doubt on the effectiveness of this approach and urges colleges and universities to cease funding such programs. GHSA feels, however, that social norming has many potential benefits and that further demonstration programs and evaluative research must be conducted.

One of the most controversial recommendations in the NAS report is the one to increase federal alcohol excise taxes. While GHSA does not have explicit policy supporting such an increase, the Association strongly opposes any effort to reduce alcohol excise taxes, as has been proposed in S. 809 and H.R. 1305. Under these legislative initiatives, federal beer taxes would be rolled back to their 1951 level, effectively reducing the taxes by 50 percent. Economic studies have shown that the price of alcoholic beverages, particularly beer, is very elastic: the lower the price, the higher the demand for the product. Conversely, the higher the price, the lower the demand. These studies estimate that the 1991 increase in beer taxes saved more than 600 young lives in alcohol-related crashes each year. Hence, if beer is the alcoholic drink of choice of young persons, and if the price is reduced, it is predictable that young persons will drink more beer. From GHSA's perspective, this will lead to more underage drinking and driving and more needless loss of young lives. GHSA therefore strongly believes that lowering the price of alcoholic beverages is very poor public policy and should be avoided at all costs.

Another controversial recommendation focuses on alcohol advertising and urges that alcohol companies refrain from marketing practices that have a substantial underage appeal. The report also recommends that alcohol trade associations strengthen their voluntary advertising codes so that commercial messages are not placed in venues that have a substantial underage appeal. GHSA strongly concurs with both recommendations.

The Association was very disappointed with the recent Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) report which concluded that the alcohol industry is complying with a previous FTC order that limited advertising to media with at least a 50 percent adult audience. While we applaud the actions of the Beer Institute and the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States to immediately raise the voluntary standard to 70 percent, GHSA believes that even that standard is too low. GHSA was particularly disappointed that the FTC did not use the Congressional-mandated review of industry advertising practices as an opportunity to convene the alcohol industry, safety groups, and prevention organizations to hammer out revised advertising standards that could be acceptable to all parties. We believe that the solution to the alcohol advertising problem must be a joint effort between the industry as well as agencies and organizations that are responsible for halting underage drinking.

This concludes the statement of the Governors Highway Safety Association. Thank you for the opportunity to submit our views on such an important issue and one that is of high priority to the Association and Congress.