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When you hear lawmakers, wholesalers and lobbyists talk about shipping wine directly to consumers, all they’ll want to talk about is how important it is to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors.
On that single point, they are correct: It is important to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors. It’s something we take seriously enough that people who are not yet 21 cannot even see the Uncorked page on Facebook, though, of course, there’s no way to score wine there.
But in the debate over direct shipment of wine, it is also the largest red herring you’ll ever see.
Last Sunday, The Journal Gazette reported on an Indiana Excise Police program that sent minors into retail establishments trying to buy alcohol. A shocking 35 percent were able to do so.
But the numbers are actually a lot worse than that.
See, the 35 percent was the total percentage across all types of retail. When broken down, the numbers go even higher. While private clubs, drugstores and groceries sold to minors in the sting 12 percent of the time, 21 percent and 26 percent, respectively, those numbers paled in comparison to hotels, package liquor stores and restaurants and bars.
Make no mistake, even selling to minors 12 percent of the time is unacceptable. But hotels sold to minors at three times that rate: 36 percent of the time. And package liquor stores sold 40 percent of the time, the state reported.
Meanwhile, minors walking into restaurants or bars were able to buy alcohol 44 percent of the time. When Ted Williams in the 1941 baseball season got a hit 4.06 times out of every 10 times he was up to bat, he was the greatest hitter in the history of the game, a record that still stands. Minors in Indiana have that beat by a mile when it comes to scoring a drink at a bar or restaurant.
Those aren’t the first stings, either.
In July 2008, The Journal Gazette reported on an Allen County sheriff’s sting where minors were able to buy alcohol at six liquor stores. That followed a June sting where they were able to buy at eight stores. Two of the stores were caught selling to minors in both stings. That’s 14 sales in 45 attempts, or almost one out of every three. In baseball, a .311 batting average will get you in the Hall of Fame.
Why does all this matter?
Because minors don’t buy alcohol online. Nowhere in America has any jurisdiction complained about a rash of minors getting alcohol through the Internet.
Why would they when it’s this easy to get it instantly – no credit card needed, no getting an adult to sign for delivery, no waiting for days or weeks for it to be delivered and no shipping charges?
And the really scary thing is that even the purchases the minors make are only a small fraction of the problem.
As we reported in this column a year ago, a four-year study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration showed that most youth get their alcohol from their parents or other adults.
Seven out of 10 teens in the study got their alcohol for free; of the three in 10 who paid for it, two had someone buy for them and one bought it themselves, usually at a store. Meanwhile, none of the tens of thousands of teens surveyed in the study reported buying alcohol online. Zero.
So while the wholesalers and the lawmakers who work for them are jumping up and down about how direct shipping will put alcohol into minors’ hands, they’re ignoring not just the real problem, but a problem so large by comparison it’s beyond laughable.
The real issue is that the wholesalers have a legal monopoly and they want to keep it that way. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on lobbyists and campaign contributions, and it has gotten them the best lawmakers money can buy: The same people who say they’re pro-farm, pro-small business, pro-family business and pro-agri-tourism sold out the state’s wine industry to the liquor lobby in a move that would have closed every winery in the state but one.
In the “compromise” that followed, we got a Byzantine law that makes it all but impossible for a willing adult to call a winery and order products he could not otherwise buy here.
While they claim direct shipping would imperil the almighty three-tier system that has made them rich, that system has minors buying their product at a rate better than one in every three attempts, and in some cases at almost one in every two.
In the meantime, they run smokescreen debates like whether to allow sales on Sunday.
Until common sense prevails, we can only say “Cheers!” to the majority of retail outlets that refused to sell to minors. Keep up the good work.
