Scott Wiener's SB 76 is designed to help businesses in San Francisco by ignoring the public health and safety issues we already face. As with many bills in the last three years, it is intended to raise the amount of alcohol consumed, raise the amount of alcohol sold, lessen the public spaces in which alcohol service is not present, and reduce the liability licensees have for their customers. Since 2020, the embrace of these kinds of deregulatory policies has had predictable effects: 26% increase in alcohol mortality between 2019 and 2020 (White et al. 2022), an 11% increase from 2020 to 2021 (CDC WONDER, 2023), and a 2.9% increase in alcohol drinks consumed per capita (NIAAA, 2022). SB 76 will continue this wild increase in harm. Alcohol Justice and the California Alcohol Policy Alliance (CAPA) have the following six central concerns: 1. There are no safety guardrails in SB 76. It lacks temporal guardrails: nothing limits the times, days, numbers of consecutive days, hours, etc. that an entertainment zone can be in effect. And nothing creates an obligation among licensees to provide for security. 2. SB 76 creates conditions of total non-accountability for licensees, and makes it so even those who want to be accountable cannot. By enabling most consumption to occur off- premises, licensees have no ability to register if a customer is at risk of harming themselves or someone else. This ends up rendering the responsible beverage service training requirement, which this legislature just recently passed into law, null and void. 3. SB 76 incentivizes a “pump and chug” form of service that is unsafe by nature. There is no expectation that the service within entertainment zones is within the bar. This minimizes contact with the customer—and therefore the opportunity to be accountable for the general welfare of the licensee’s patrons— but also lends itself to rapid turnover of high-ABV product. Without an expectation that alcohol sales and consumption occur within the premises of the bar, this becomes a threat to public health, a threat to public safety, and a bad deal for the licensee’s employees. 4. There is no inherent accountability in SB 76 to residents of the areas declared “entertainment zones”. The experience of living on a street with a number of bars and restaurants is emphatically different than one where individuals are gathering and drinking on the street until some indeterminate time. 5. The circumstances within these entertainment zone all but guarantee youth access to alcohol. Between the overall lack of oversight of customers, the lack of any established guiderails on attendees (e.g., wristbanding, and/or security at a road-closure point checking ID before patrons can enter the area), the likely recklessness with which high-volume “pump and chug” service will proceed, the lack of an expectation of any licensee-provided or local government-provided security, and the general ability to be lost in the chaos that accompanies this kind of service environment, it will be extraordinarily easy for youth to obtain alcohol within these entertainment zones. 6. The experience of this in California—and outside of California—is checkered with concerning levels of violence. And there is no evidence, and no reason to expect to find evidence, that legally facilitated alcohol consumption makes violence less frequent. These entertainment zones will generate irregular hotspots of violence. SB 76 is just more bad public policy surrounding alcohol in California that will hurt the state far more than help a few nightlife businesses or special events. Please use your power to reduce alcohol-related harm in California, not make it worse. VETO SB 76.

SB 76 is designed to help businesses by ignoring the public health and safety issues we already face. Every year thousands of California lives are cut short or forever damaged due to alcohol, the human toll and the economic costs are truly staggering. According to the CA Dept. of Public Health there has been a 140% increase in alcohol-related deaths over the past 5 years. The increase is seen across all causes, including accident-related motor vehicle crashes, chronic conditions such as liver disease and cancers, and poisonings. The CDC tells us that alcohol-related harms cost the state $14.47 billion annually. SB 76 can only make these horrible statistics worse. Helping businesses that stay profitable by selling alcohol subsidizes all the harm that follows. Please do the right thing, VETO SB 76, then focus on reducing current levels of alcohol-related harm in California instead of raising them.