Stop Paying for Super Bowl's
Secondhand Alcohol Impacts!

Safer Super Bowl 2005. Here's what you can do:
1. Safer Super Bowl Game Plan
2. Talk Back to BIG Alcohol

Background
The Super Bowl delivers many superlatives; the largest TV audience of the year, the most private parties (exceeding even New Year's Eve), and the highest priced TV advertising. Sadly, the Super Bowl may also be the best time to experience alcohol's widespread "secondhand" effects and assess the enormous costs to our nation.

Secondhand Effects
Public recognition of tobacco's impact on the health of non-smokers from passive exposure to cigarette smoke was a critical turning point in building momentum for the tobacco control movement. With the exception of drinking-driving crashes, we are less accustomed to thinking about the secondhand effects of alcohol. But alcohol's external impacts are even greater than those of tobacco. In addition to innocent lives lost and injuries to non-drinkers resulting from alcohol-related crashes, alcohol is a contributing factor in roughly half of all injury deaths (fires, falls, drowning), most cases of homicide, and a significant percentage of all other violent crimes including rape. Alcohol use results in more than $100 billion in lost productivity both from premature death and an estimated 500 million lost workdays each year. Alcohol use is also strongly correlated with family violence. And, although alcohol alone does not cause violence against women, experts in the field acknowledge that alcohol use often triggers or exacerbates incidents of violence in the home.

A Super Size Dose of Trouble
Both research and anecdotal observations suggest that Super Bowl Sunday brings an extra large dose of alcohol-related problems to communities across the country. Each year, long before anyone knows which football teams will be in the national championship, people are preparing for the downside of Super Bowl Sunday-and not just in Jacksonville, Florida, where the next one will be played on February 6, 2005.

Police and sheriff's departments across the country have already scheduled extra officers in case celebrations after the next Super Bowl turn violent-as they have in Oakland, Denver, Dallas and Boston when those cities' football teams were in the Super Bowl. Trauma centers and emergency medical response teams are making sure they will be ready for the excess alcohol-related highway deaths and injuries-on average 32 percent higher than on other non-holiday Sundays in California-that follow the Super Bowl broadcast each year. People who work in shelters for victims of family violence are ensuring appropriate coverage because, like other major holidays, Super Bowl Sunday is often an extra busy day.

Preparation Not Prevention
While public officials recognize the need to be ready for Super Bowl Sunday's extraordinary-but not unexpected-demands on public health and safety services, they appear to treat Super Bowl Sunday like an earthquake or hurricane-a natural force, whose destruction can be minimized, but not prevented. In reality, most of the impacts associated with Super Bowl Sunday are fueled in large part by preventable problems. Addressing the availability and promotion of alcoholic beverages can prevent many of these consequences.

But far from taking steps to reduce alcohol's negative impact, the City Council of Jacksonville, Florida-at the request of the National Football League-has suspended many local laws that prevent alcohol-related problems. Laws against open containers, noise pollution, and outdoor alcohol sales will not be enforced within a designated 2½ mile entertainment zone starting 18 days before the game. A similar party zone, created for the 2004 Super Bowl in Houston, drew 150,000 people and resulted, according to the Houston Chronicle, in "one shooting and a mere 125 arrests." Houston had budgeted more than a million dollars in police overtime to control the crowds of "drunken revelers." But the Mardi-Gras atmosphere cultivated in Houston spread via TV to every sports bar and Super Bowl party in the country-with predictable results.

Who Pays?
Even if you can avoid alcohol-impaired drivers and street violence on Super Bowl Sunday, you will still pay for some of the day's festivities. The burden of addressing alcohol's secondhand impacts on Super Bowl Sunday falls disproportionately on taxpayers-who underwrite the cost of public safety response, public works, and the criminal justice system. The alcohol industry, which reaps profits from high sales volume, offsets only a tiny percentage of such costs through excise taxes, license fees and fines.