Study: Lots of people drink alcohol at sporting events

Based on the breathalyzer results of a small percentage of sports fans who agreed to be tested post-game, the roads leading away from major sporting events could be chock full of drunk drivers, says Scientific American. If you extrapolate the findings of this study to entire NFL games, as many as 5000 people could be leaving each game, legally too drunk to drive.

That extrapolation is interesting as a thought experiment, but it's not necessarily a valid thing to do with this small of a per-game sample size, especially when the people sampled were (partially, anyway) self-selected. In reality, the numbers could be lower or higher. I bring this study up, though, because it is apparently one of the first attempts, ever, to measure the blood alcohol content of people leaving major sporting events. It was meant to test the feasibility of such a study, as much as anything else. Conclusion: It's possible. And the study also brings up some interesting questions that I hope will be addressed in future research:

• Are baseball and football fans different from other sports fans, when it comes to drinking? What about hockey and basketball? Or something less popular, like volleyball?
• How do these numbers compare to the percentage of legally inebriated people leaving other kinds of cultural events, like plays?

• What were the transportation choices of the people sampled? I don't really care if you get drunk at a Packer's game, as long as somebody sober drives you home.

• How does the percentage of legally inebriated people who choose to drive after a sports game compare to, say, the percentage of legally inebriated people who choose to drive home from a play, and from the bars on Saturday night? And how do those figures compare to the BACs of a random sampling of Americans driving on a busy highway? Is there just a flat percentage of us who don't care much about driving drunk? Or does the size of that group vary by activity?

(Via Brian Mossop)

Some rights reserved by jasondmckay

• [MrJM]

  I would highly recommend that motorists avoid all roads within a 100 mile radius of Soldier Field on Sunday.

• [libraryboi]

  It is this culture of inebriation that needs to change. I don’t understand why it is considered normal behavior to get drunk for any reason. It’s something that society needs to outgrow, much like wife beating and other social ills of the past.

  • [Boondocker]

    libraryboi, when you say “get drunk for any reason,” are you objecting to people getting drunk ever, or getting drunk for any reason they can invent?

    • [jackie31337]

      It’s entirely possible to drink without getting drunk, or at least without getting drunk being the sole reason for drinking. I really don’t understand the point of (binge) drinking to inebriation, but I do enjoy having a drink or two with friends.

      • [Boondocker]

        Thanks, but you’re not really saying anything all that revelatory. I asked libraryboi that questions to clarify his/her (probably his) stance. I used to be pretty holier-than-thou about drinking, so I was just curious as to where he was going with it.

• [Dan]

  At what point are you considered “Drunk”?

  When over the Local Legal limit?
  This certainly is not “Drunk” as defined by wikipedia.

  At 0.20% BAC I and several others I know are equally inebriated than another several others at 0.04%

  Neither of us should drive at this point, but why does the media always call people “Too Drunk” at .08?

  At .08 it is impossible to tell if I have any alcohol in my system. Reaction times are not affected, judgement is not affected, seriously WTF??

• [Baldhead]

  Despite the fact of a station (helpfully named “Stadium”- Vancouver put them right next door to each other) right next door, I still try to be well away from the area when a game or concert is over in part for this reason. The other part of the reason is because there’s a lot of stupid drivers who shouldn’t be behind the wheel sober, either. Makes no difference if an idiot or a drunk killed you. And pedestrias, drunk or not are a menace to bike when encountered in large numbers

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Study: Lots of people sport alcohol at drinking events

  IMHO, that has been conclusively proven to be so.

• [Bryan C]

  Is there a sudden surge of drunk-driving-related accidents near stadiums after major sporting events? That would be a much more useful statistic. The legal blood alcohol level has been ratcheting downward for years. That makes MAD happy since they’ve been co-opted by modern prohibitionists, and it makes police departments happy since they’re happy to have another excuse to pull people over. But whether it’s realistic, sound science is a different issue entirely.

  And, of course, breathalyzer results can also be artificially high if the subject has just had a drink, which I suspect would be the case for many people leaving a stadium.

  Anyway, I don’t go to sports and am but a very light drinker. Most people I do know who regularly attend sporting events have designated drivers, carpool with non-drinkers if they intend to drink, take public transportation to the stadium to avoid parking hassles.

• [obdan]

  oh boy.. the party’s over.

• [teapot]

  If you actually care about the game being played, watching the TV is always better than being surrounded by screaming morons anyway.

  Alcohol, however you look at it, causes far more health and societal problems than weed but the Federal zealots in the US continue to insist on dictating world policy while raking in billions in tax and kickbacks from alcohol producers. Who are the real criminals? People who grow a plant, light it on fire and breathe – or people who profit from allowing damage to the health of the very citizens and society they are elected to protect?

  Fuck you US Federal government. Support the killers while persecuting individuals (on the taxpayer’s dollar).

• [Anonymous]

  (In response to Bryan C)

  Sort of. There was a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 by Redelmeier and Stewart where they report that, compared with the Sunday before and after, Superbowl Sunday has a statistically significant increase in the number of traffic fatalities following the game, but not before or after.

  Full Disclosure: I’m the author of this BAC study.

  Darin

• [Mitch_]

  I appreciate the responsible inebriated sports fans who pay me to transport them home or between bars after games. Share the wealth. Take a taxi home from the game.

  Knowing that sports fans drink at games, sports venues ought to be built with taxi stands capable of handling a large queue of vehicles similar to the ones at airports.

  • [chgoliz]

    Taxi stands outside popular drinking locations: now THAT is a useful suggestion.

    Anon @ #34: No, that is not a false impression. Most people in the U.S. really do drive almost everywhere.

    Anon @ #38: In Chicago, Soldier Field is about 3/4 of a mile away from a Metra train station (a commuter train line; not the same system as the CTA bus/subway/el system): virtually no one knows that because it is not well marked so you need to know where you are going, and it mostly heads south (to the south side of the city…oh, the horror), with only 2 stops further north, taking you only as far as the edge of the Loop. Needless to say, it is not well used. There is an “el” stop, but that’s about 1.5 miles away and the walk there is not pedestrian-friendly. There is a reasonably close “el” stop to both Wrigley Field and “the Cell” (U.S. Cellular Field, previously known as Comiskey Park). So yes, there is public transport, but it’s not NY, London or Paris…that’s for sure.

• [Anonymous]

  If anyone were ever to administer breathalyzer tests to the drivers leaving the annual police holiday party, it would provide interesting and somehow unsurprising data.

• [Beryllium]

  Additional question: Is this type of study vulnerable to some variation of the Hawthorne Effect?

  (of course, they probably answered or addressed that in TFA. But I’m too busy to click! :) )

• [Captain Obviousness]

  I think there is a willful blindness policy of city cops around stadiums. It’s kind of a big joke – everyone knows a huge percentage (maybe 10-20%) of the drivers exiting a stadium (an NFL stadium anyway, particularly an afternoon/evening game) are drunk. However, if the cops put up sobriety check points at each parking lot exit it would tie up traffic horribly and would royally piss off all the fans who pay big money to attend these games, buy food/drinks at these games, and park at these games. The city taxes all of those transactions, so the city sure as hell doesn’t want to discourage people from going to sporting events by actively policing drunk driving around stadium exits.

• [PatrThom]

  I would be most interested to know the percentage of inebriated (legally or otherwise) people leaving the Capitol building at the end of each day.

• [Boondocker]

  At $10/beer, this hockey fan was most certainly not drunk post-game. Seriously, guys? $10 for Molson?

• [areich]

  You forgot chess, boxing, and chess boxing.

• [Anonymous]

  What if they set up a study so that everyone leaving a sporting event would be asked to take a voluntary, private breathalyzer (sort of like a voting booth)? The data would then be kept anonymous by the researchers and could also be given to the subject so that they would know if they were legally drunk or not, but could still choose to drive drunk nonetheless. It only becomes draconian and bad if you give the results to cops and start arresting people based on it, or something.

• [mn_camera]

  I don’t really care if you get drunk at a Packer’s game, as long as somebody sober drives you home.

  I think the fans at Packer games tend to show up drunk and go from there.

• [Anonymous]

  How else are you supposed to make watching sports bearable?

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  It’s mind-boggling to me that a small group of people engages in healthy exercise while a large group of people in the stands and a gigantic group of people on their couches pay tribute by consuming as much fat and ethanol as possible. And decades after the last time that they actually played sports, they still describe themselves as sportsmen.

  • [Anonymous]

    i find irony in the way people watching operas don’t sing.

    • [Antinous / Moderator]

      i find irony in the way people watching operas don’t sing.

      It would be a better parallel to speak of people who listen to opera gargling with drain cleaner. And many people who listen to opera DO sing.

  • [querent]

    As Homer once said, “Ah, the tailgate party. Where Americans congregate to consume fatty foods and alcohol in anticipation of watching others exercise.”

  • [Cowicide]

    Welp, you might as well get drunk off your ass and eat greasy food while supporting the right wing through money laundering.

    Dave Zirin on “Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love”

  • [fg]

    I am not sure practicing a sport at the highest level can be considered “healthy exercise”.

• [Campbell]

  They often have large booze buses (these are what we call the drink driving check police operations) after large sporting events. You would have to be thick as two planks to drink drive after attedning the footy, cricket or tennis here in Melnourne. It is a simple “blow into this” here, no need for any dumb “get out of the car and hop on one leg thing” the tv tells us you do in the States. They can test thousands of drivers an hour.

  Still, they are always catching people, more so now they can test also for illicit drug use. These tend to get people leaving raves and dance parties, not suprisingly.

  Now that I am 39 and no longer take dumb risks with my and others lives, I am very happy with the safer roads we have here because of these police testing.

• [Anonymous]

  Is it OK if I’m drunk driving WHILE posting to BoingBoing?

• [Anonymous]

  Of course, nothing will ever be done about this, because these venues count on beer sales when there’s a major sporting event.

• [bkad]

  They often have large booze buses (these are what we call the drink driving check police operations) after large sporting events. You would have to be thick as two planks to drink drive after attedning the footy, cricket or tennis here in Melnourne. It is a simple “blow into this” here, no need for any dumb “get out of the car and hop on one leg thing” the tv tells us you do in the States. They can test thousands of drivers an hour.

  I have seen such things in the states, at wine festivals. It seems the method could be used more widely if it needs to be. Maybe studies like this (and the follow up studies) are what is needed to determine if there really is a need.

• [Anonymous]

  The US media regularly gives the impression that people in the US drive everywhere, even if drinking. In the UK I’d never dream of drink driving. It has a huge stigma here. I’d walk or take a taxi, train or bus. In the US it seems almost accepted as the norm. Are the US films and TV shows I see giving me a false impression?

  • [Maggie Koerth-Baker]

    It’s hard to say, and probably varies by demographic group. Anecdotally, I’d bet that Americans around my parents’ age (early 50s) and older are a lot more comfortable with the idea of driving tipsy, or even drunk, than Americans under, say, 40.

    There was a big cultural shift in acceptability of drunk driving that happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At age (29), you’ll hear people admit to having done it, but there’s much more of a sense that this is bad or shameful, and something you shouldn’t do.

    Where you live—and availability of other options—probably also matters a lot. It was a lot easier for me to be responsible about never driving drunk in my college town (where everybody I knew lived within walking distance of where we were drinking), and here in Minneapolis (where there is decent public transportation and taxi service), than it was when I lived in Birmingham, Al., which has none of those things.

    Designated drivers—one person in a group who doesn’t drink at all, so they can drive everyone else home—is a concept that’s pushed heavily. But I don’t know how popular it actually is in practice. It’s more common to have one person who drinks a little, but cuts themselves off earlier than everybody else. But I don’t know how successful that strategy actually is at reducing the number of accidents.

    In general, I’d guess more Americans drive drunk than Europeans. But I’d guess that has more to do with the fact that our cities are set up for cars, not public transportation.

• [Cowicide]

  Meanwhile, pot remains illegal. Makes perfect sense…

  o_O

• [Utenzil]

  I am pretty sure that the “hop on one leg” thing is to provide an opportunity for arrest *without* failing a breathalyzer– if you can’t pass that test, it doesn’t matter what the breathalyzer says.

  The whole thing is extreme societal dissonance: there are all manner of venues and events that typically involve driving to and have a diposition towards facilitating the consumption of alcohol. “Scientifically”, yes, these things should not exist, but socially, they are numerous and even socially perpetuated, and multi-billion dollar industries, in turn yielding rich bonanzas of tax revenues, revolve around the steady consumption of such beverages at such venues and events.

  “Scientifically”, one should drink alone, in one’s house and not leave until BAC is 0.00000, lest one be caught on a security camera with an inebriated appearance. If one happes to be visited, one should *not* offer any such beverage to the visitor, lest one be held liable for consequences befalling the visitor after consuming said beverage.

  Just hold your knees and rock in your chair, ok?

• [Anonymous]

  Hey, we discovered this back in 1970s in Argentina. Some clever guy said “hey, this people are returning home drunk”, and also discovered a weird relationship between being drunk and being violent when your team loses (sounds reasonable haaa?).

  Back in the 70s I said, so, what is happening to you?. Are Bud and Miller paying too much to obviate this obvious conclusion?, you corporations are killing you. Too bad.

• [Nash Rambler]

  “Study: Lots of people drink alcohol at sporting events” Slow news day, eh?

• [emilydickinsonridesabmx]

  This isn’t the least bit surprising. I would love to see a study that also measures the amount of drunk people on the roads who might not have been attending a game in person, but were watching a game at a bar or someone else home.

  Each year a few members of my family throw a big Superbowl bash. I have zero interest in football, but I’m all about spread of yummy but terrible for you food they put out.

  Every year as we drive home from NJ to Brooklyn, I am absolutely terrified of what I see happening on the roads. It’s really obvious that a large number of people on the roads right after the Super Bowl ends are completely hammered. We’ve witnessed half a dozen terrible accidents, people swerving off the road and into the medians, and drivers who are not able to keep their car pointed in a straight line. Last year we saw someone driving the wrong way on the shoulder of the NJ Turnpike. That isn’t an easy thing to do, you have to be really impaired to make a mistake like that.

• [Anonymous]

  What percentage of stadiums in the US have decent public transit as an option?

  I assume that some of the East coast cities are more likely to have the stadium in a more built up area just based on population density, but I could be wrong. I know Chicago’s Soldier Field is pretty close to Downtown, and Chicago has a decent rail system.

  Squeezing into a bus is completely different than squeezing into a train, and add the breath of hundreds of drunken sports fans and the differences get even worse.

  I’ve found Seattle’s football and baseball stadiums are well served by public transit, even though you have to walk over half a mile through parking lots to get to the nearest station.

• [Roy Trumbull]

  Those who attend operas need a double scotch or two during each intermission in order to stay the course.

  • [TakeThatSubspace!]

    I never watch sport, in person or at home. But I do watch a butt-load of films and I don’t need to drink to get through them.*

    Maybe these people should get a hobby they actually enjoy…

    *I mean sure I drink while watching films, I just don’t NEED to.

    ++++++++++++++

    For anyone else interested in the press conference Scientific American, the NFL and the Green Bay Packers are holding tomorrow to confirm that Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh built their offices on a Native American burial site which Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh got cheap when Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh evicted the orphans, nuns and cancer patients living there, it’s been pushed back to 7pm.

  • [grimc]

    They also get the opportunity to sleep it off before they go home.

• [ill lich]

  I have long believed that there are many thousands of drunk drivers on the road at any given time who are pretty safe drivers: everyone’s alcohol tolerance is different, and I myself have driven when I was probably over the limit (though I still think it was foolish and dangerous and I am not proud of it.) The “legal limit” is a lowest common denominator situation (probably for good reason) that ends up hurting those who are safe drivers even after a couple drinks.

  As an aside, I knew a professional truck driver who regularly smoked pot on the job, all day long, and used to buy urine to pass his piss tests. He did this for years with no accidents or missed deliveries.

• [hungryjoe]

  We went to a Panthers game a few years ago, and I was blown away by how drunk those people were. I just didn’t understand how it would be. I thought there would be a lot of diehard fans who had a drink or two, but were there to see their team. But they showed up drunk and got drunker, and then we all got in our cars and hit the roads. There were cops everywhere, but I think their goal was to keep us all moving, get us into our cars, and out of there before we started a riot.

  I don’t have anything against drinking, but drunk driving is just inexcusable.

• [chgoliz]

  You can drink as much as you want if you walk or take public transportation home.

  Sacrilege, I know…at least in most of the U.S.

  • [k7aay]

    > chgoliz:
    > You can drink as much as you want if you walk or take
    > public transportation home.

    Or, as long as your horse is sober:

    http://www.mercurynews.com/weird-news/ci_17119914?nclick_check=1
    

  • [HornCologne]

    chgoliz:
    You can drink as much as you want if you walk or take public transportation home. Sacrilege, I know…at least in most of the U.S.

    Yep! Most European stadiums have their own subway/tube/train station and public transit puts on an azz-ton of extra trains to get everyone out of there quickly at the end of the game, concert, monster truck rally, or whatevs …

    Dear US: the key is MIXED ZONING. Let me live next door to where I drink and I won’t drive home drunk! Ipso Facto!

    • [Symbiote]

      I used to live near the Chelsea stadium in London — capacity 42000, and there’s no parking at all. When there’s a football match the police close the surrounding roads to give more space for pedestrians.

      It’s a couple of minutes walk from a station (Fulham Broadway), and five minutes from a station on another line (West Brompton). I think that helps spread people out a bit, compared to having the station inside the stadium itself.

      You can officially fit about 1500 people on a District Line train, I bet it’s more than that if people squash up a bit.

• [Anonymous]

  I thought this was a story from The Onion when I read the headline. When I read the article I decided to stop reading websites. Thanks for all the good memories.