Economic, physical, and demographic restrictions on the availability of alcohol (i.e., increases in the price of alcohol, reductions in alcohol outlet densities, and increases in minimum legal drinking age) have been related to alcohol use and related problems. These studies have not examined the joint effects of restrictions on economic, physical, and demographic availability on alcohol use and related problems. No studies have comprehensively examined the relative contributions of different restrictions on availability one to the other or considered whether different regulatory policies may have different effects in different states. The research proposed in this 5-year project will re-examine and extend prior studies of the relationships between controls on alcohol availability, alcohol use, and related problems to (1) assess the joint contributions of changes in availability upon alcohol sales and related problems and (2) determine whether the same availability policy has the same or different effects in different states. A federal tax policy may reduce alcohol-related crashes by 2 % across states, yet have no effect in some states and dramatic effects in others. It will be argued that such differences are predictable from simple formulations of the relationships between availability, use and problems. The proposed work will construct a state level dataset that includes measures of economic, physical, and demographic restrictions on availability, alcohol sales, self-reported alcohol use, and alcohol-related morbidity and mortality for 48 states over approximately 30 years (n x t = 1,440). These data will be used to answer four questions: (1) What are the independent contributions of changes in economic, physical, and demographic availability to changes in alcohol sales? (2) Are the effects of one form of availability (e.g., economic) conditional upon another (e.g., physical)? (3) What are the independent contributions of changes in economic, physical, and demographic availability to changes in alcohol related problems? (4) Are these effects """"""""fixed"""""""" or are they conditional upon state level characteristics of drinking populations? The short-term goal of the proposed work will be to replicate and extend prior studies of availability, use and problems. It will also assess the degree to which the effects of availability are contingent upon one another and other state level characteristics. The long-term goals of the study are to support state-specific alcohol policy recommendations.
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