Mandatory ID Checks for Nonalcoholic Beer?
If you walk into a grocery store and pick up a six-pack of nonalcoholic beer, you might be caught off guard by an unexpected request to show your ID to the cashier. As a matter of inventory protocol, nonalcoholic beers are often categorized under similar stock-keeping unit (SKU) numbers as regular beer, which can result in a would-be buyer automatically getting carded at the register. But what might be an occasional, if annoying, quirk of modern retailing could soon become a government mandate.
Various “experts” are calling on state governments to impose age restrictions on the sale of nonalcoholic drinks, according to CNN. This is being pushed under the guise of protecting against underage alcohol consumption, based on the argument that products like nonalcoholic beer could be a gateway to the real thing. The reality is that imposing age restrictions on nonalcoholic beverages could actually result in more youth drinking, not less.
The experts quoted by CNN cite research surveys conducted abroad that supposedly show that youths who drink nonalcoholic beverages are more likely to also drink alcoholic beverages. One of the studies, for instance, polled Japanese adolescents and found consumption of nonalcoholic beverages “was strongly associated with alcohol use in high school students.”Â
This sounds pretty damning until one reads the next sentence of the researchers’ conclusions, in which they have spectacularly buried the actual results of their work: “concerns that [nonalcoholic beverage] use would lead to increased alcohol use were not supported because [nonalcoholic beverage] consumption usually started after adolescents began consuming alcohol” [emphasis added]. In other words, the adolescents first started drinking booze, then started drinking alcohol-free options, not vice versa.
Perhaps expecting journalists, much less researchers themselves, to understand the difference between correlation and causation is too high of an ask, but it only gets worse. A researcher from Australia is also interviewed about focus groups and surveys he conducted of Australian youth drinking and the potential interplay of nonalcoholic beverages. According to the researcher, “a few teens mentioned they had gotten used to the taste of beer by drinking zero alcohol ver
Article from Reason.com
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