Alcohol Education Program: Reduce Consumption in Your Community

Roughly half of U.S. adults drink alcohol. Luckily, most engage in responsible drinking, but there are a lot of ways to overdo it.

Specifically, there are four types of drinking that the CDC identifies as problematic.

This week, we’re looking at excessive alcohol consumption; what qualifies, how common it is, and what it costs individuals and communities. Then we’ll look at effective ways to reduce alcohol consumption, including alcohol awareness training.

What Is Excessive Alcohol Consumption?

“Excessive alcohol consumption” is a term used by the CDC to broadly describe a few different patterns of drinking behavior that put the drinker’s health and well-being at risk.

The CDC includes four different types of problematic drinking under the label:

• Binge Drinking, defined as drinking heavily on a single occasion (4+ standard drinks for women or 5+ for men)
• Heavy Drinking, defined as drinking heavily over the course of the week (8+ standard drinks for women, 15+ for men
• Underage Drinking, defined as any alcohol use by someone under the age of 21
• Drinking While Pregnant, defined as any alcohol use during pregnancy

How Common is Excessive Alcohol Consumption?

According to the CDC, 17% of American adults binge drink at least occasionally, and 6% engage in heavy drinking. From a different angle,

Underage drinking is a little less common than adult binge drinking. When taking the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 14.6% of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 20 reported using alcohol in the past month. Binge drinking is common in this age group, compounding the risks to their health and well-being.

Finally, CDC data indicates that nearly 14% of pregnant women aged 18 to 49 report some degree of alcohol consumption, with 5% of them admitting to binge drinking in the past month.

Is Excessive Drinking the Same Thing as Alcohol Dependence?

No – excessive consumption of alcohol isn’t the same thing as alcohol dependency, and CDC data confirms that most excessive drinkers do not have an alcohol use disorder (AUD)

Excessive drinking is a pattern of behavior, while alcoholism (formally known as "alcohol use disorder" or AUD) is a medical condition with symptoms like:

• Strong cravings for alcohol, like the inability to think of anything but how much you want a drink
• Withdrawal symptoms like shakiness, restlessness, trouble sleeping, nausea, sweating, a racing heart, or seizures
• Inability to control your drinking, including the inability to cut out drinking, drinking more or longer than intended, and continuing to drink despite serious negative consequences

Only 4.5% of U.S. adults fit the DSM-IV definition of AUD, while excessive drinking is more common.  

That said, both AUD and excessive alcohol consumption can fairly be referred to as a “drinking problem.”

Why Does Excessive Drinking Matter?

Excessive drinkers, with or without a clinical dependency problem, often have alcohol-related problems that hurt their health, their social lives, and their work. Some have legal problems, as well.

Added together, these individual problems amount to a serious problem for a community. Excessive drinking is associated with violence, unintentional injuries, sexually transmitted infections, and unwanted pregnancy.

According to the CDC, excessive drinking leads to 178,000 deaths each year, shortening the lifespan of these individuals by an average of 24 years they could have had with friends and family. Additionally, a study by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that fetal alcohol spectrum disorders may be as common as 1-5% of first-grade children.

The most recent estimation of the economic cost of excessive drinking, from 2010, reckoned that it created almost $250 billion in losses, including lost labor, lower work performance, property damage, crashes, criminal justice costs, and healthcare costs.

How To Reduce Alcohol Consumption

There are a lot of ways to reduce alcohol consumption.

Place Restrictions on Alcohol Retail

The CDC's Community Preventative Services Task Force recommends a few interventions proven effective in reducing excessive alcohol use. These include:

• Regulating the density of alcohol outlets in your community
• Increasing taxes on alcoholic beverages at the federal, state, or local level
• Limiting the days and hours for the legal sale of alcohol

These are all methods for making alcohol less readily available. The fact that this reduces excessive drinking probably shouldn't be a surprise, but the CDC did its homework.

Hold Alcohol Retailers Liable for Customers' Actions

Many jurisdictions have so-called dram shop laws, which hold businesses that sell alcohol liable for any harm caused by overly intoxicated customers, particularly if they ignored or violated warning signs of intoxication or underage drinking. In some jurisdictions, bartenders can even face criminal charges for overserving.

These laws incentivize business owners and their frontline workers to think about how local businesses can promote responsible drinking. When they’re worried about liability, they’re more vigilant about curbing excessive drinking.

The CDC's task force concluded that dram shop laws are successful as community initiatives to reduce alcohol-related harm.

Require Alcohol Education Programs for Sellers & Servers

Although dram shop laws make businesses and bartenders more motivated to avoid overserving and underage sales, that doesn’t help much if the staff on the frontlines don’t know how to recognize potential problems and intervene effectively.

That’s why many jurisdictions require or incentivize alcohol awareness training, sometimes also referred to as responsible alcohol seller/server training. It’s one of the best ways to reduce alcohol consumption through education because it enables better decisions by bartenders and corner store clerks.

These training programs help sellers and servers understand:

• How their role impacts public safety
• Relevant federal, state, and local laws that apply to their job
• The liability that seller-servers have for the acts of their customers (if applicable)
• Factors that impact alcohol absorption and blood alcohol content
• How to check IDs and recognize a fake ID
• Behavioral cues to recognize a minor trying to buy alcohol directly or through a second party
• How to recognize someone too intoxicated to purchase more alcohol

Even if your state or local jurisdiction doesn’t mandate or incentivize alcohol awareness training for liquor licensees, local businesses may have their own policies. That’s because training programs reduce a business's liability, reduce their insurance rates, and minimize the criminal and civil penalties they face.

Establishing Community Alcohol Education Programs

While legal and regulatory initiatives can reduce alcohol consumption by making it more difficult to drink excessively, there is always a workaround for people who are determined enough.

That’s why a crucial piece of this puzzle is to encourage responsible drinking at the individual level. That includes community alcohol education programs aimed at the general public.

Organizing alcohol awareness programs for schools and workplaces can get important information about the costs of excessive drinking into the hands of people in your community and encourage them to make better choices.

Choose Effective Alcohol Awareness Training

Our Training for Intervention Procedures (TIPS) is a skills-based seller/server training program that’s popular with employers and approved for regulatory use in many jurisdictions.

We have both online and classroom options, and courses that target specific roles or settings like on-premises, off-premises, gambling establishments, or college campuses.

Check out our offerings in your state and enroll today!