"Come for vacation, leave on probation"
Plus: That booch-on-booch deal arrives!
Editor’s note: Hello and welcome to Lobby Time, Fingers’ weekly overview of booze-related legislative moves around the country, published exclusively for paid subscribers. (Buy a subscription now to read this and all my coverage.) I’m piloting a new format for this paid-only feature, but my aim for now is to publish it in this Tuesday slot for the next couple months and see how it goes. Reply directly to this email or hit the comments to let me know what you think!—Dave.
Five years ago, Utah dropped its drunk-driving limit from the national-standard 0.08% blood-alcohol content (BAC) to 0.05%. Critics said the move, which was signed into law in 2017 and took effect in 2019, would harm tourism in the Beehive State. The American Beverage Institute, a restaurant lobbying group, infamously ran a full-page newspaper ad in neighboring Idaho and Nevada while the legislation was still in bill form warning would-be interstate travelers that they’d “come for vacation [and] leave on probation.” It was—and I don’t throw this word around often—a masterpiece:
The bill passed anyway, making Utah the first state in the country where you’re legally drunk behind the wheel at 0.05% BAC. The year the law went into effect, fatal crashes dropped almost 20%, according to a 2022 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety administration (though it appears to have bounced back a bit during the pandemic.) The same research found no evidence that the change affected Utah’s tourism revenues. Now, another state with a serious vacation economy is trying to follow suit with a BAC revision of its own.