We're here with the doctor who has dedicated his life to research impacts of liquor advertising on our kids and issue of under aged drinking which we have taken on here at KNME TV and want to continue that thought with a discussion with them today. A research associate professor at Georgetown university and also executive director of the center on alcohol marketing and youth. You spent time recently with the joint taskforce in Santa Fe at the roundhouse with us.  Share a little bit about what you discovered in our attempts to curb teenage drinking here in the state and some of the things that you shared with them.
 >> Sure, it is exciting for to us see what is happening in New Mexico. There are a lot of things that states can do to limit youth exposure to alcohol advertising and most states aren't using most of that power. And so, my presentation to this taskforce that was set up by a memorial passed by your legislature, it is a taskforce to look specifically on alcohol advertising and young people and so, my task was to layout the field. What regulates alcohol advertising currently, which is mostly the alcohol industry is self regulating. And, what the research is on the impact of alcohol advertising on kids and then what are the things that states can do.
>> Let's back up and talk about that research, stuff you have done at Georgetown, what do we know today about the impact of advertising alcohol and our youth, what has been the impact on that?
>> We know more than we did five or six years ago. Specifically there are several longitudinal studies that followed cohorts of young people overtime from before they started to drinking through the initiation of drinking. And have measured their exposure to various kinds of alcohol marketing, including advertising on TV, radio, et cetera, but, also, things like exposure at beer concessions or concerts. Or, things like that. What those studies have all found is the more exposure kids have to the advertising, the more likely they are to drink or if they are already drinking, to drink more. Now, we're never going to get the definitive gold standard that says that alcohol advertising causes kids to drink because we're never going to have a case controlled study, never will get a group of kids that have zero exposure to alcohol marketing so these long-term studies are next best thing and it is apparent that what kids like about alcohol advertising is story, humor, character, and music. If an ad has those elements, kids are more likely to like the ad and then they are more likely, A, to believe that good things will happen when you drink, but they are also more likely to believe that their peers are drinking and that peers approve of drinking. Apparently what the ads do, part of what they do is to set up an artificial peer group in kids' heads. They create a norm for kids that may not reflect the norm that is actually out there.
>> When you use the word exposure, break that down a little bit, what does that mean, how often, where?
 >> On television alone in 2005, the average kid saw 309 alcohol commercials. So, this industry has 309 conversations with our children about the positive aspects of drinking.
And, it would be hard for any parent to match that. I don't have as specific numbers in terms of magazines, radio, et cetera. What our studies at the center on alcohol marketing and youth have tried to look at is who is seeing the advertising? Based on where it is placed, who is most likely to be in the audience and what studies have found is that a substantial segment of the advertising is being placed on programming or in magazines, where kids are more likely to be in the audience than adults
>> Does that include sports?
>> Most sports television get as very broad swath of viewership. On TV A lot of late night television, it is cable, in particular.  Comedy central, VH-1. BET has eliminated almost all the alcohol advertising at this point but for a while it was a huge place where we found disproportionate exposure. There has been an explosion of advertising in the last six years, particularly distilled spirits, 1900 in 2001, and 47,000 in 2005.
>> What do you attribute that leap to?
>> Well, they have to compete. They tried to get on broadcast and the four broadcast networks have a voluntary ban on hard liquor advertising, so, after they tried an experiment with NBC, one of the companies made a deal with NBC that okay, if you will
let our ads on if we show responsibility ads, they agreed to some formula, four ads per one responsibility ad and they started showing a trickle of advertising and there was a huge public outcry. And, NBC reversed itself, upheld its ban on disstilled spirits advertising. At that point, the largest disstilled spirit company in the world said okay we're going to create our own network. We're going to get on to cable and local cable systems and we're going to buy local TV time so that we can compete, they see this as leveling the playing field with beer. What we see is that at the same time this is
happening, under age kids and particularly girls have shifted their beverage preference from beer to distilled spirits. I can't say that the TV advertising is the causal or the sole causal factor, but you have two things happening in the same place at the same time and as a parent, I am concerned about my kids using alcohol under age, period, but I am much more concerned if they are more likely to be using hard liquor, where an inexperienced drinker is more likely to be vulnerable to alcohol poisoning, to imbibe, you know, there is much more kick there.
>> Let me ask you this, in some of your research, one thing that caught my eye was the
industry, liquor industry spends about two billion dollars on so-called straight advertising. Newspapers, radio, TV, billboards.
>> Measured media.
>> But when you factor in other types of things, I would like to ask what the other types are, the real number is about six billion dollars. So, they are using clever ways to get message out.
>> So many ways this message gets out beyond the measured media. Product placement on movies and on television and the latest version of this, Coors got itself one of its brands placed in a skit on Saturday night live, so, scripted mention.
>> Product placement, on-premise promotions, things like spring break, campus promotions, sports sponsorship. Entertainment and other kind of concert sponsorships, Internet. Viral marketing, which is an emerging new area, a couple of the companies have put ads up on youtube, ads that have never been broadcast, they put them up on youtube and hope for a viral eruption.  And one of these -- well, two of these have had more than three million hits.
>> Interesting. You know, when you factor in, when I go to college campuses here at UNM or other places in the country, it is -- music -- new music and alcohol, seems to be such a common hand in hand practice now. It is almost tailor made it seems for the liquor industry. How do you combat what we're talking about here, these kind of placements of advertising?
>> Well, it is pretty straightforward and it is actually easier to combat than taking on advertising by virtue of its content, which is what people did for years. For years, people see an ad and they would be upset and say, this is obviously targeting kids or this is obviously showing too much violence or sex or whatever and they complain. That is a very difficult process to go through, it is subjective raises first amendment issues. Our center's approach to it was to say, okay, instead of looking at content, let's look just at placement. Let's look at who the audience is and let's get numbers that the industry itself can't argue with, because we'll take them from the same sources, we subscribe to Neilson, to arbitron, to the coin of the realm, in terms of ad placement. Data sources. And, so then what we do with those data is we make an argument for common sense proportional standard and this is where we were helped greatly at academy of sciences, institute of medicine and national research Council in 2003, took a comprehensive look at whole underage drinking issue and one of the recommendations was that the industry needed to move immediately to a 25% maximum for a percentage of underaged folks in audiences where they placed their advertising. And eventually move towards a 15% maximum. At the time they were at a 50% maximum. Which, covered about 1% of television programming, very shortly thereafter, and a lot of pressure, we think, from the Federal trade commission, they moved to 30%. Now, 15% is the percentage of 12 to 20 year olds, group most at risk of initiating underage drinking in population 12 and above, that is only population measured for radio and magazine. 13% of the two plus population, that is the population measured for television. So, 15% is roughly a proportional standard, it is a very modest request of the industry, it is kind of common sense that this product is illegal for that swath of the population. It doesn't really make sense to put the advertising in places where those people are more likely than everybody else to see it. That is the policy argument, that we have been trying to make and it is a policy argument in the realm of the industry's own self regulation. That is the way that this would happen. And, that is the national picture on this. But, what I was talking about here in New Mexico today is what can happen at the state level. And this is an exciting and largely unexplored realm for states. States, turns out when the state is the speaker, there are no first amendment issues, so, states can ban alcohol advertising on public lands, in public publications, at festivals or community events like cinco de mayo, when it is held in a public park, it is perfectly okay for the state to say there can be no alcohol. On postsecondary institutions, states can say, no alcohol advertising on college campuses. Public transit. All kinds of publicly funded public transit, the state is speaking and can ban advertising there. The state can also ban some of the other forms of promotions that we find are major factors in kids' decisions to drink promotions and giveaways. Alcohol related trinkets and trash as they say, hats, T-shirt, stuffed animals, mugs, et cetera, turns out study after study is finding that kids who own one of those are far more likely to initiate drinking than kids who don't. And this is when they own it prior to initiation of drinking. So, states can ban that.
>> We have high minority population here, Hispanic, certainly, the numbers when it comes to Hispanic youth and African American youth are off the charts, talk about that.
>> Well, what our studies have found is in the context of youth in general, often being more likely to seat advertising than adults than Hispanic and African American are more likely. We looked at English language magazines for the Hispanic youth, we couldn't get data on the spanish language magazines.  We found substantially more than 20% more exposure for studies and again, frequently the Hispanic youth are getting greater exposure than youth in general. The numbers are even worse for African American youth. These are two population, let me talk about Hispanic youth on the minute on epidemiology in drinking in that population Hispanic youth, particularly boys are much more likely to start drinking earlier. This may be cultural, I don't know. That is what the EPI says. By the time they are seniors in high school, they have fallen behind the white kids, but, 8th grade and even into 9th and 10th, they are more likely to be initiating early. The studies of what happens to kids who start drinking early, they are far more likely to suffer from alcohol related problems later in life, in fact, kid whose start drinking before age 15 are five times more likely to have an alcohol problem, four times more likely to become addicted, seven times more likely to be in a motor vehicle crash after drinking and 11 times more likely to be in a physical fight and so on. So our challenge here is to delay onset of drinking as long as possible and there are practice reasons for this and there are
 apparently neurological developmental reasons for this and this is research that is just
starting to come out. The simplest way of putting it is that executive part of the brain, the part that says, don't, matures later than the thrill seeking, risk taking part of the brain, the part that says do. And so, there is this vulnerable period in mid to late adolescent, reaching for some people into early 20's, where it makes sense to be more protective.
>> Beginning of our conversation, you talked about the group you met with in Santa Fe,
memorial 64 and in that memorial, they reference some things that are going on in municipalities around the country that have some traction. And you mentioned that we might be the first state possibly to consider something like this on a state-wide bases, which would be welcome news here, for sure.
>> Your definite I the first state to look at this comprehensively and say, look at all at once and say, what are all the things that we could do. Best practices, Albuquerque has a billboard ordinance. A number of states around the county billboard ordinances limb thing where alcohol and tobacco bill billboarding can be placed we define what a best practice, 500 feet from schools, churches, play groundses, places where you expect young people to be. That has with stood constitutional muster at the Supreme Court level, states can do that. And, this isn't something, then that have you some to wait for every city to do, the state could do it, Ohio has done it, public transit, the city of Philadelphia realized 26,000 kids were taking public trance it to school everyday and so, they banned alcohol advertising on the bus shelters. Pennsylvania and New York are both considering state-wide bans on public transit on alcohol ads on public transit at all. In the bay area, public transit system had a ban on alcohol advertising, they repealed it there was a lot of community outcry, they had to reverse themselves. So, then, retail signage. You know, this is a big part of kids' lives, there was a study done in Chicago of all the signage around a small number of elementary and middle schools. And, sure enough, the more exposure kids had to that signage, the more likely they were to drink. So, what a number of states have done is said, you can't put or can't cover more than a certain percent of your retail windows with alcohol advertising. It makes a huge difference in sort of general
appearance quality of life in the community and it also is an easy way to reduce kids' exposure.
>> In part of our history here in New Mexico, we had a pretty good dust up over the closing of drive-up liquor windows, took time to get this done, the public, you know, part of public wanted to see the ban, another good percentage did not. It felt it was an inconveniencie to have them go away but eventually got this.  In your view, what you have seen, what is the big stumbling block for policymakers to put it in motion; is the liquor industry that powerful in state roundhouses or capitols to hold this kind of thing off or is it just the fact that the will of the people and policymakers are enough to get it done if they want to?
>> I think it is a bit of both. The industry certainly has a strong financial interest in making alcohol as available as possible and as popular as possible. Et cetera. On the other hand, there is the whole issue of political will. We have got science here. We have got so much science at this point about how you reduce the likely had that people will run into trouble with alcohol. We have 30 years of science where people have done study after study after study. These studies have been collected. I mean, it is the finest science that you can get on the issue to show that things like drive up windows, just don't make sense. It is a common sense -- one of those common sense things that science has to prove over and over again. The more available alcohol is, the more likely people are to drink and the more likely it is that they will then have problems from the drinking. It is that simple. Similarly on the advertising issue. You know. Everybody wants to deny that ads affect them.  Ask you anybody on the street, I don't believe advertising. But, study after study, shows that they do and, in particular, they affect our kids. And, there is actually some research that shows that they are more likely to affect the kids than to affect even the young adult group. There is a lot happening in adolescents, now, the brewers years ago said, get -- back when drinking age was lower, they said, get somebody by the time they are 18 and you have got a drinker for life, that brand preference is established at a fairly young age.
>> Sounds like it is a case of consequence versus intent. I mean, the brands  would say, look, we're just trying to build brand loyalty that you mentioned, have people switch, but what you're saying from hearing you is kids internalize that message differently, they hear a much different song so to speak as opposed to brand X versus brand K. What can be done about that, is that spill over, just innocent consequence of that branding tactic?
>> Well, I can't say anything about the advertiser's intent. Without cases like the tobacco experience had, where they got documents where they could see marketing plans, I can't say anything about intent. What I can say is what is happening in the marketplace. And again, innocent, guilty, I don't want to use those terms. But, it is aPparent that most of the brands hit the legal age audience harder than underaged audience and some brands consistently hit the underaged audience so the question to those brands and the parent companies that own them is why is this necessary? And if you are supposed to be a model self regulating industry, which is how they would like to present themselves, how sufficient is yourself regulation? This is the issue and this is the issue that the federal trade commission looked at over and over again in 1999, they put out a somewhat critical report. In 2003, we think, you know, in the context of negotiations to get the industry to adopt tighter standards, they put out a positive report. Currently, they are writing the next report. It will come out somewhere March or April of next year. And, those reports are important. What is critical here is keeping the spotlight. Or what these companies are doing and that is write like to think that our organization has played a good role. In that we have consistently released more than 20 reports since we came into being in 2002. Just, repeatedly saying to the industry, we're watching, we're counting. And we're naming names. We know which brands are responsible for substantial amounts of the youth's exposure and we're going to name those names.
>> One of the subjects that the surgeon general brought up when he was visiting here was individual responsibility, meaning us as adults. What can any one person do. I am thinking of a time in my life, I used to go to a neighbor's house to watch a hockey game, cases of beer in the house, beer advertising on the television, almost this odd symmetry to the whole thing and message was clear for us young kids that were watching the game with the family. What can we do individually to step up about this idea of underaged drinking and letting kids know this is just not something they should not get into too early.  That things like family dinners, regular times when you you can interact with your kids, you know, I found driving the kids to high school was just an awesome time, that car time where you can have the casual conversation so it is not some weird interaction but integrate it into the rest of your relationship with your young people. But, the standard thing that parents get told is you need to talk to your kids about drinking and what I would add to that is you have to talk to your kids about alcohol advertising. And marketing. You have to help them understand that this is never going to show the whole picture. And a certain amount of awareness in the home, parents heavy drinking is one of the biggest predictors for underage heavy drinking. We have to look at how available alcohol is. Is it something for special occasions? Are we using it everyday. How much are we using everyday? do we drink over the standard dietary guidelines, two for men; one for women? Questions like that but we have to help our kids out. Things that I would do as parent, alcohol ads come on and I make fun of it. You know. Or I use it as an opportunity to broach the whole question of drinking and consequences and things like that. But the last thing I would say about us as parents is parenting is one of the hardest jobs in the world. It is endless. And, parents need all the help they can get and they are not getting as much help as they could from this industry. This is an industry that says over and over to parents, it is your fault, your responsibility, you need to do a better job of raising your kids, at the same time they are having an average of 309 conversations with our kids on TV a year. That is TV alone about the positive acceleration aspects of a product. It is very hard for a parent to keep up with that. Another thing our studies have found is that the placement of the advertising, means that if you're a responsible parent and you're trying to monitor your child's exposure to alcohol advertising, you have got the toughest job of anybody, because you're in the group, 35 plus group, they are the group that is least likely to see this kind of advertising. This is literally advertising that is placed to fly under the parental radar.
>> Interesting, doctor, from Georgetown, thank you for spending time with us and spending time with our legislation in the roundhouse on this issue and come back and see us here in New Mexico again.
>> Thank you.