Alcohol-to-Go Laws During COVID-19: Restaurant Visits, DUI Arrests, and Alcohol-Impaired Traffic Fatalities

This study evaluates whether pandemic-era "alcohol-to-go" laws, adopted in most U.S. states to support restaurants and bars, produced measurable effects on economic activity and impaired driving.

We used a staggered difference-in-differences design to compare outcomes in states that adopted alcohol-to-go laws between 2020 and 2021 to never-adopting states. Policy adoption dates were drawn from the Alcohol Policy Information System. Outcomes were measured using three complementary datasets: (1) SafeGraph Patterns for weekly restaurant and bar visits (2019-2022), (2) the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) for non-fatal DUI arrests (2018-2022), and (3) the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) for alcohol-impaired traffic fatalities (2018-2022). Analyses were conducted at the county-month level.

Alcohol-to-go laws did not produce consistent or durable changes in levels of restaurant or bar visitation. Average treatment effects on visits were small and statistically insignificant across adoption cohorts. Similarly, we found no systematic evidence that alcohol-to-go laws affected DUI arrest rates or alcohol-involved traffic fatalities. The instances where we found significant effects were limited to isolated adoption cohorts or settings and lacked broader generalizability.

Alcohol-to-go policies neither delivered the economic relief anticipated by policymakers nor generated the public safety harms feared by critics. Findings suggest these laws produced limited, context-dependent effects. As states debate whether to make such provisions permanent, evidence indicates caution is warranted: benefits appear narrow while risks remain uncertain.