There is tenacity, there is stubbornness, and then there is a determination to ignore the health and wellbeing of your constituents no matter what you’ve learned. Call it “Wienerness.” In 2017, California State Sen. Scott Wiener introduced a bill to strip away California’s standardized 2 a.m. last call times. Rather than agree to study the impacts of the bill, Sen. Wiener pulled it then reintroduced it in 2018, this time as a geographically limited “pilot project”. After the senator began arbitrarily adding new cities to the “pilot,” Gov. Jerry Brown put the brakes on it with a veto.
“I believe we have enough mischief from midnight to two without adding two more hours of mayhem,” the then-Governor wrote in his veto message.
And now Sen. Wiener continues his campaign of contempt for evidence-based policy. The 4 a.m. bar bill has been reintroduced for a third time, in violation of the spirit of senate rules that discourage reintroducing failed bills in consecutive sessions. The new—but functionally identical—bill, SB 58, opens up ten of the largest cities in California to late last calls. This would have the effect of dramatically raising rates of violence, injury, crime, and driving under the influence. Moreover, because the bill affects such major metropolitan areas, it creates a “splash effect,” wherein outlying towns and cities are burdened with intoxicated late-night traffic while the economic benefits accrue only in the big city centers.
“Later bar times benefit business owners while the cost of cleaning up spilled blood and splattered brains after 4 a.m. will come from public resources,” warns Bruce Lee Livingston, Executive Director/CEO of Alcohol Justice.
It is time to hold Sen. Wiener accountable for his overt lies about last call times. Decades of research from across the developed world show that maintaining a sensible last call time lessens alcohol harms. Californians need to stand up to representatives who just channel their corporate clients, and end the 4 a.m. fiasco for good.
TAKE ACTION to stop the 4 A.M. bar bill for the third time, or text "JUSTICE" to 313131
READ MORE about the harms of extending last call times
To public health advocates burnt by fighting against toxic industries, the legal marijuana landscape has two big pitfalls in it:
Hi-Fi Hops, the new foray into drinkable cannabis from Heineken, shows every sign of the latter. The product, sold under Heineken’s phony-craft Lagunitas label, intentionally circumvents California labeling and licensing restrictions intended to separate the marijuana and alcohol marketplaces. According to guidance issued by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, retailers cannot sell both alcohol and marijuana in the same location, nor can they sell cannabis-infused alcohol products.
These simple and straightforward rules did nothing to deter Heineken. Its Hi-Fi Hops product features the Lagunitas label and carbonated water produced by Lagunitas, but has THC and CBD added in by a second company (Cannacraft, headed up by CEO Bill Silver, founder of the Wine Business Institute at Sonoma State University). Since the drink is alcohol-free and the cannabinoids are added in at a second location, Heineken obeys the letter of the law while showing contempt for the spirit.
Separating alcohol from cannabis helps both denormalize alcohol and discourage the mixing of the two. The harm from the latter is obvious and well-documented: mixing alcohol and marijuana is more incapacitating and dangerous than using either alone. The harm from normalization, however, is more pervasive.
Normalization is Big Alcohol’s lifeblood. They can only continue to sell more product if people drink in more situations and/or more heavily than they used to. This is why we are seeing a constant chipping away at the firewalls between alcohol service and day-to-day life: persistent efforts to roll back advertising restrictions, extend last call hours, and facilitate serving alcohol on school campuses, among other recent legislative eyesores.
Having consumers associate alcohol with marijuana use has an added benefit in that consumers, in a void, may preferentially choose marijuana to the exclusion of alcohol. According to the New York Times, Molson Coors advised its stockholders that “legal cannabis … may result in a shift of discretionary income away from our products or a change in consumer preferences away from beer." This has led to major buyouts of cannabis product companies by Molson Coors and Constellation Brands (who make Corona beer and Svedka vodka, among other mass-market brands), as well as Heineken’s exploitive partnership.
This kind of could signal the beginning of a trend that Alcohol Justice has long warned against. California cannot afford to make the same mistakes with marijuana regulation that we made with alcohol regulation. Either get Heineken’s brand names off Hi-Fi Hops or get Hi-Fi Hops off the shelves.
READ MORE about how Big Alcohol undermines public health and safety.
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