The Interplay of Local- and State-Level Alcohol Policies in the United States

Most research on alcohol control policies in the United States has focused on the state level. In this study, we assessed both local and state policy prevalence and restrictiveness in a nationwide sample of cities.

We conducted original legal research to assess prevalence of local-level policies across 374 cities (48 states) in 2019 for the following seven policy areas: (a) drink specials; (b) beverage service training; (c) minimum age for on-premise servers and bartenders; (d) minimum age for off-premise sellers; (e) prohibitions against hosting underage drinking parties (i.e., social host provisions); (f) bans on off-premise Sunday sales; and (g) keg registration. We obtained parallel state-level policies from the Alcohol Policy Information System. We assessed the restrictiveness of existing policies and how these compared across local and state levels.

We found that for six of the seven policy areas, the majority of cities (53% to 83%) had only a state-level policy. Few cities (0% to 8% across policy areas) had only a local-level policy. The percentage of cities that had an alcohol policy at both the local and state levels ranged from less than 1% to 19% across policy areas, and the policies were mostly equally restrictive at both levels.

The lack of local policies may point to areas where these localities could strengthen their alcohol policy environments. Additional research is needed to understand how the prevalence and restrictiveness of local and state policies are associated with public health harms such as traffic crashes.