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Study Says Beer Drinkers Likelier to be in Drunk Driving Deaths

by Kathy Jones on Jan 1 2012 7:50 PM

 Study Says Beer Drinkers Likelier to be in Drunk Driving Deaths
A new study suggests that beer drinkers are most likely to drive drunk and get involved in driving fatalities than wine or scotch drinkers.
In fact, the study found that states with higher wine consumption actually have fewer drunk driving deaths, Discovery News reported.

"Beer has the strongest link to traffic fatalities, then spirits, while wine has a negative impact on traffic fatalities," said Bradley Rickard, assistant professor of economics and applied management at Cornell University.

"Wine is more likely to be consumed with food. That has an impact. We also suspect that there are different demographic groups that consume this alcohol.

"May be the audience that consumes wine is less likely to drink and drive and be in a traffic accident," he said.

Rickard said he and his colleagues at Cornell were motivated by recent efforts to block the sale of wine in grocery stories.

Opponents said the greater availability of wine would actually result in more youth drinking, health problems and traffic deaths. Rickard says his study actually counters that final argument.

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"Our results suggest that arguments against legislation that proposes to introduce wine into grocery stores for reasons related to traffic fatalities may be misguided," the study stated.

"Specifically, the conventional wisdom that alcoholic beverages with higher ethanol content are more dangerous in terms of traffic fatalities is not obvious in our simulation results," he stated.

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Rickard said restricting alcohol sales after 10 p.m. has the strongest negative pressure on drunk driving deaths.

"We're not advocating that people drink wine and then they are fine to drive. We're just saying look over the last 25 years, it has been those states with higher rate of beer consumption have higher traffic fatalities," Rickard added.

The study was published in this month's Journal of the American Association of Wine Economists.

Source-ANI


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