New Mexico begins alcohol deliveries despite public health concerns

Lawrence Medina was 12 years old when he started to drink alcohol, and he drank heavily throughout his adolescence.

He didn’t keep track of how much he drank, he said, just that he did it everyday. 

“When it came to drinking beer and liquor,” he said, “I drank to oblivion. You know what I mean? It was just: ‘I drink daily.’”

By the time he was 18, he was already abusing alcohol, Medina said, and by the time he was 22, he was in a rehab program for chronic alcoholism. 

Now, he serves as the executive director of the Rio Grande Alcoholism Treatment Program (ATP) in Taos. 

Medina said he’s concerned about the state’s move to relax restrictions on alcohol deliveries. 

“When I was actively living with alcoholism, it was very hard to stop,” he said. “And having easy access to it didn’t help the matter.”

New Mexico joined the rest of the nation in allowing for home delivery of alcohol from restaurants, liquor stores, grocery stores, breweries, wineries, distillers and third-party delivery drivers on Sept. 28, according to the New Mexico Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. 

Pandemic lockdowns financially hobbled many restaurants and other alcohol outlets across the country, leading to a wave of state-level alcohol delivery laws. Forty-two other states had either temporary or permanent alcohol delivery rules in place by March. 

Medina said he the new law that allows for alcohol to be delivered to people’s homes will increase the demand for treatment. 

“The population of individuals living with addiction is going to be impacted by it, and we will see an increase of people needing treatment and possibly more deaths,” he said. 

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association submitted a letter to the federal Alcohol, Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau in August. 

“As the alcohol industry consolidates and corporate interests align, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) serves as the critical defense to maintain proven regulations that protect children and communities,” Benjamin wrote.  

The association suggested that the federal alcohol laws might supersede or overlap with some of the state’s laws, and the state deregulation efforts might be mitigated by the bureau. 

Benjamin asked the federal government to oppose industry pressure to remove established federal regulations that protect the public’s health and safety.

The American Public Health Association letter does not go so far as to ask for intervention that will stamp out all state alcohol delivery provisions but warned that the deregulation of alcohol prevention policies — including legalizing deliveries — will have a negative impact on morbidity and mortality rates.

David Jernigan, professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and the preeminent expert on alcohol-related illness-prevention strategies, said alcohol policy deregulation like the New Mexico law leads to more alcohol dependency and more related deaths. 

“We’ve got an unseen, unrecognized epidemic happening alongside the pandemic,” he said. “And at the same time, we’re doing the things that decades of public health research have said are all the wrong things to do if you want to reduce and prevent alcohol problems.”

Alcohol-related deaths reached an all-time high in 2020 in New Mexico, according to a report presented to the state Legislative Finance Committee on Aug. 26. New Mexico also became the state with the highest rate of alcohol-related deaths in the nation. 

Trips to the emergency room, poisonings and alcohol-related “diseases of despair” are also on the rise, Jernigan said. 

Diseases of despair are three classes of behavior-related medical conditions experienced by people who have a sense that their “long-term social and economic outlook is bleak,” according to the Washington Post. The three disease types are overdose, suicide and alcoholic liver disease.

ID checks and underage drinking

Accessing alcohol as a minor in New Mexico was relatively easy for Medina. 

“Growing up in New Mexico, in a rural area, we had older friends buying us alcohol,” Medina said.  “And, in some areas, you had bootleggers that we would access. And then, when I came to an age — and I got smarter — I got a fake ID.”

A key reason why alcohol deliveries have proven to be dangerous in other states is that ID checks are less easy to monitor and enforce at the point of delivery, Jernigan said. 

Food delivery apps have facilitated a surge in alcohol sales to minors across the country, according to the Washington Post. Instances of drinks being left on doorsteps without any interaction, delivered in readily accessible cups with straw holes, and ordered independent of meals were commonplace. 

Experts say that the delivery drivers failing to check a physical ID is common.

There is a lack of training on how to check and recognize IDs at the point of delivery and “all of their incentives are to make the delivery and move on to the next,” Jernigan said. Most delivery drivers who arrive and drop things off quickly can end up making more money per hour. 

New Mexico’s new alcohol delivery law requires that every driver who is going to deliver alcohol take server training, said Andrew Vallejos, the director of the New Mexico Alcoholic Beverage Control division. 

“Everyone who’s making a delivery — whether you work for the liquor store, or if you work for the brew pub, or if you’re using a third-party delivery system — every person who’s making the delivery has to be alcohol server-certified,” Vallejo said. 

A server training program typically includes facts about regulations, not serving minors, the effects of alcohol, methods of detecting intoxicated patrons, intervention methods, a blood-alcohol content chart, a test for servers and, at the end, a course completion certification. 

“They have to take a class on how to check for IDs, how to check for intoxication — sort of a jurisprudence class — and that every server has to take,” Vallejo said. 

Still, he also said there is no specific training for delivery drivers.

“The delivery is just sort of like the same way a waitress would deliver on-premise, right?” he said. “If you’re doing a home delivery, you have to check an ID. If they don’t have an ID, you can’t sell it to them.”

Way to Serve and the New Mexico Restaurant Association’s ServSafe, online programs that provide training for servers in New Mexico, do not show any  specialized server training options for alcohol delivery drivers on their websites. 

Easier access for people with a chronic problem

Medina said alcohol delivery will increase access for those with chronic alcoholism. 

There is nothing in the statute or the regulations that limit the number of deliveries to the same residence over a specified period of time. 

“Accessibility that way for chronic alcoholics is very dangerous, because they don’t have to go anywhere now, and they could have their alcohol delivered,” he said. “And there’s no screening if that person is alcoholic or not. They’re putting profit above public safety or public health.”

Companies push back against limits for people who consume the most alcohol because it cuts into profits and a key consumer base, Jernigan agreed.

The industry is concentrated and in the hands of a small number of companies who make a lot of money, Jernigan said, “and they make that money off of all drinking,” he said. “But in particular, they make a lot of that money off of high-risk drinking.”

Vallejo said the state’s alcohol control division decided that they didn’t want to be too detailed about who to cut off and who to deliver to in the rule making including tracking the number of times a specific residence has purchased alcohol. 

“We didn’t want to be so specific — like having too burdensome of a rule — whereby you’re trying to prescribe every action and to try to anticipate every scenario,” Vallejo said. 

Though New Mexico is a little later than the rest of the country when it comes to adopting alcohol delivery rules, he said, it’s still a relatively new practice nationwide.

“There’s a little bit of history to it, But it’s a new enforcement paradigm for us,” he said. “So it’s just something that we’re going to have to get used to, and acclimatize ourselves to a little bit.”

The pandemic bill

The 2020 alcohol deliveries bill was bipartisan and co-sponsored by Rep. Antonio “Moe” Maestas (D- Albuquerque), Sen. Daniel A. Ivey-Soto (D-Albuquerque), Rep. Rod Montoya (R -Farmington), Rep. Joshua Hernandez (R-Rio Rancho) and Rep. Dayan Hochman-Vigil (D-Albuquerque).  

Rep. Montoya said he co-sponsored this bill because it was important for the economic viability of restaurants and other small businesses across the state. 

“This was important to make sure that in any future disruption — as long as the workforce would be able to go in there and continue to cook —  that they could also sell alcohol, which they are licensed to sell, through delivery,” Montoya said. 

Montoya said that economic benefits to the restaurants and other alcohol outlets weren’t the only reason the bill was an important piece of legislation. There is also a public health advantage to keeping those who want to drink more alcohol off the road, he said. 

“Say you’re watching a football game and some more people show up. The guy who’s hosting decides, ‘Hey, I’m going to go hop in my car, drive down to the liquor store and come back with more.’ This law allows him to call a liquor store, or order more food and have them deliver alcohol with it, and it keeps him off the road,” Montoya said. 

In 2019, drinking and driving accounted for about 5.75 or 6% of the total alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 people, according to the National Highway Safety Administration.  

Jernigan said that states across the nation have a history of forgetting that increasing access to alcohol results in more alcohol related deaths.

“We have a kind of societal amnesia about alcohol. It’s just that people literally forget,” Jernigan said. “And, there is a very large, very profitable industry that has an interest in helping people forget the negative consequences of alcohol use.”