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http://dispatch.com/health/health.php?story=dispatch/2006/01/18/20060118-A1-03.html
LIQUOR SALES INCREASE
Ohioans buy more booze, but beer sales a little flat
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
James Nash
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
<!--PHOTOS--> <table class="phototableright" align="right" border="0"><!-- begin large ad code --> <tbody><tr><td> <table align="center"> <tbody><tr><td align="center"></td></tr> <tr><td class="credit" width="200"> SHARI LEWIS | DISPATCH </td></tr> <tr><td class="cutline" width="200">Eric Alexander, shopping for vodka, is typical of many Ohio drinkers who have turned away from beer for distilled spirits and are paying more for their alcoholic beverages. </td></tr> </tbody></table> </td></tr> </tbody></table>
Ohioans are learning to hold their liquor.
After steady declines in the 1980s and early 1990s, sales of the hard stuff are up: the average Ohioan of drinking age consumes nearly 1.2 gallons a year.
State residents are drinking more hard liquor than they have since 1989 and spending more on it than they ever have, according to statistics released yesterday by the Ohio Division of Liquor Control.
The trend is bringing good spirits to bar and liquor-store owners but causing mild alarm among alcohol-treatment professionals and police, who are seeing an uptick in alcohol-related crashes in cities.
Hard liquor is supplanting beer as the intoxicant of choice for many younger drinkers. Older people are continuing to drink the state’s most popular, and generally less expensive, hard liquor: Kamchatka vodka.
"We always used to sell more beer than liquor and now it’s pulled even and on some days, it’s actually more liquor than beer," said Dick Allen, owner of Zeno’s, a convenience store in the Short North.
The state doesn’t track beer and wine sales, but bar and store owners say beer receipts have been stagnating because of changing tastes and concern about calories and carbohydrates.
Typical of the trend is Eric Alexander, a 35-year-old North Side resident who drank beer at bars in his 20s but has moved on to more-sophisticated fare. Alexander was shopping yesterday at ABC Liquor on E. Dublin-Granville Road, whose products range from 99-cent cans of Budweiser to bottles of Johnny Walker Blue Label scotch for $213.
Alexander said he mixes many of his own drinks at home, often with the popular Absolut vodka brand.
"That would be my favorite," he said. "I’ve moved up to that in the last year. (At home), you can mix it any way you want."
Even with the rebound in liquor sales since 1998, Ohio is not one of the heaviestdrinking states in the country.
Ohioans drink more beer per capita than the nation at large, but less wine and hard spirits, according to statistics compiled by the National Institutes of Health.
The data from 2003, the latest available, show Ohio residents consume 28 percent less hard liquor than the national average, while drinking 9 percent more beer.
But Ohioans drank 1.6 million gallons more hard liquor in 2005 than in 1996 and 1997, when liquor consumption fell to its modern low. Some of the increase comes from cheaper, store-bought booze like Kamchatka, which retails for $15.40 for a 1.75-liter bottle — less than half the cost of Absolut.
Sales of premium spirits in bars are surging behind the popularity of fancy mixed drinks in a rainbow of colors and flavors. For many younger bar patrons, the martinilike concoctions have their own cachet, said Todd Anderson, owner of Bristol, a martini bar in the Short North.
"They really aren’t drinking martinis," Anderson said. "It’s really a lifestyle they’re buying into."
But the popularity of the drinking lifestyle — with its addictions and fatal accidents — isn’t being universally cheered. Some experts in alcoholism in Ohio said higher per-capita alcohol consumption doesn’t automatically mean a similar increase in alcoholism or problem drinking, but the trend is troubling.
"If the per-capita consumption is increasing, I’d guess that the number of people needing treatment has also increased," said John Carroll, a Dayton substance-abuse counselor who heads the Ohio Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors. "There’s never enough service to meet the needs of the population."
Fewer people died in Ohio due to drunken-driving accidents in 2005 compared with 2004, but the number of alcohol-related deaths in urban areas increased, according to statistics released by the State Highway Patrol.
There were 390 alcohol-related traffic deaths in 2005, down from 422 the previous year. But in urban areas, the number of deaths increased from 125 to 131, and the proportion of fatal crashes that involved alcohol increased from 29 percent to 32 percent, the patrol said.
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