Freakonomics Radio - 91. Can Selling Beer Cut Down on Public Drunkenness?

Episode Date: September 5, 2012

Binge drinking is a big problem at college football games. Oliver Luck -- father of No. 1 NFL pick Andrew, and the athletic director at West Virginia University -- had an unusual idea to help solve it.

From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Risdahl. Time now for a little Freakonomics Radio. It's that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks. We talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything. Dubner, how are you? Hey, Kai.

I'm good. How are you? I'm all right. You know, getting by. So the new college football season is upon us now. It's always exciting. You know, just unbelievable sheer athleticism. You see the marching bands and the freshmen barfing all over the stadium.

Okay, wait. What? Because that's not what I was expecting. Yeah, no. So that's what I want to talk to you about today. Let me start with Oliver Luck. He is the athletic director at West Virginia University. That's what he got used to seeing at football games there.

People drinking far too much at pregame parties, tailgate parties before games, sneaking alcohol into games, leaving at halftime to drink even more and come back into the game. Now, Oliver Luck happens to be the father of quarterback Andrew Luck, who is this year's number one NFL draft pick. Yes, he was. New QB for the Indianapolis Colts. Got that right. Oliver Luck, the papa.

That's right. Yep. The papa was an NFL quarterback himself for a few years. And now as a college athletic director, he learned that most colleges, in keeping with their academic mission, do not sell alcohol at football games. I didn't know that. But not surprisingly, that doesn't stop everybody, including students from drinking, especially because some schools, West Virginia among them, they have what's called a pass out

policy. A what? Yes. You heard me right, but you're thinking differently. I am. I am. That's right. This does not have anything to do with passing out

from drinking too much. It has to do with the fact that you are allowed to pass out of the stadium and back in during the game, which means you can go out and drink. This whole thing

is not shocking, right? That's the point. It is not, but that doesn't mean you have to be happy about or even tolerate it. So Oliver Luck last year proposed two things.

One, that West Virginia get rid of that pass-out policy and that it try something different inside the stadium. Okay. So I began to think a little bit sort of counterintuitively that actually selling beer at our stadium would actually help us gain control. So here's where I need you to explain the counterintuitive thing, right? Because how does it, I mean, you get some money from the beer sales, but how does it help you control the problem if you're actually selling the beverage? Right. Let's do the money first. West Virginia did clear about $500,000 in beer sales that first year,

projected it'll probably double this year, right? That's nice. That's a lot of beer. But you're right. Now that you're selling beer in the stadium, you might think you're going to have more alcohol trouble, more arrests for underage drinking, more violence. And that is what the campus police at West Virginia last year in the first year were prepared for. But that is not what happened. Here's Police Chief Bob Roberts.

In 2010, we made 117 arrests on game days. And in this past year, we only made 79. See, that's almost, well, that's 35% reduction in arrest we made. Which is good. So what's his name, Luck, trying to sell this to other schools? I mean, get them to try it? I wouldn't say he's an evangelist quite, but when they come, when they see what's happening there and they come for help, he gives it. The University of Minnesota, for instance, wanted to try selling beer in the stadium. It had to get, however, support from the state legislature first, and Luck did talk to some legislative aides along the way. And now, as a result, this fall, Minnesota will be starting a two-year trial of beer sales.

Yeah, which totally makes sense, right? You can drink 50 feet outside the stadium gates, but you can't inside, right? Come on. I mean, look, this is complicated, and you don't want to make light of it. Alcohol abuse is a very major problem on college campuses and elsewhere. And the idea of making more alcohol available in more places may strike some people as ridiculous. But what I like about this approach is that instead of, you know, when you've got a problem, you can stick your head in the sand or you can acknowledge the problem exists and try to come up with a new kind of solution. And that, I think, is what we're talking about here.

Listen again, Kai, to West Virginia University Police Chief Bob Roberts. Okay. You know, you might as well face reality and try to control it and at least keep the environment as safe as you can. How's that for a motto, Kai? Controlling reality one day at a time. I like that, huh? That's right. Stephen Dubner, he tries to do that every day of his life.

Freakonomics.com is the website. He is back in a couple of weeks. See you, man. Thanks so much, Kai. In our next podcast, we look at what happens to your rational self when you put on a mask. A middle-aged lady came and apologized to me afterwards and said, I'm so sorry I put the mask on. I found myself being very rude. I was getting too close to the performers.

I even touched one at one point. I'm so sorry. We go behind the scenes of Sleep No More, a fantastically interesting piece of immersion theater. I got a little rude with people. I was kind of like, get the hell out of the way, man. I would not have usually blindly gone into

dark corridors, because I'm usually scared of everything. We'll also hear from the man who created the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. That's coming up on the next Freakonomics Radio podcast.