Keep Booze in Bars, Not at The Pit

I’m looking at the front page of Wednesday’s Albuquerque Journal. The top headlines are related to alcohol abuse.

The big one reads, “NOT GUILTY” in big, bold all-caps. The story is about Scott Owens, the guy who killed four teens near Santa Fe last summer. He was acquitted. His attorney never disputed Owens’ 0.16 blood-alcohol level — twice the presumptive legal intoxication limit. He only disputed reasonable certainty that Owens was solely responsible for the crash. The reasonable doubt was created by the teens’ erratic driving before the crash.

Also at the top of the page is “Beer at Pit A Step Closer.” If you read the Lobo, you know this story.

Serving alcohol at The Pit is a really bad idea. Wherever large numbers of people drink, there will be some who will abuse.
UNM may argue that beer will only be sold in luxury boxes, but it won’t be long before pushback will force UNM to sell to any Pit attendees. What percentage of 17,000 will get into trouble is anyone’s guess, but New Mexico already has too many alcohol-related problems.

For anyone watching UNM’s development patterns (and where they moved Student Services), there is no doubt that locating Lobo Village next to The Pit is no accident.

Some argue it is to house UNM athletes near where they train (something UNM denied because an athletes’ housing complex is prohibited by NCAA rules). What nobody can argue is that the proximity of The Pit to Lobo Village will increase Pit attendance by undergrads living in Lobo Village. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s a lot to be said in favor of school spirit to motivate undergrads to become grads.

But some of those undergrads who attend games will try to drink. Given the myriad of creative ways underage drinkers have of getting alcohol, this means some of those undergrads will succeed.

Regardless of whether these students will walk or drive home, this is not a good thing.

As with everywhere else in the U.S., underage drinking is a huge problem in N.M. Thirty percent of New Mexico teens report having had their first drink before age 13. There is a correlation between the age of a person’s first drink and chronic alcohol problems including dependence and abuse, liver disease, cardiovascular disease, nervous system damage and other chronic alcohol-related issues later in life.

Their children are more likely to have fetal alcohol syndrome from prenatal alcohol ingestion. People who start drinking before age 14 are five times more likely to become addicted to alcohol (that’s nearly half of them) than those who wait until they are at least 21 (slightly less than 10 percent).

Recent studies show that underage drinking causes irreparable neurological damage to the brain, including damage to anti-alcoholism coping mechanisms. In addition, alcohol significantly contributes to the top three causes of teen death: motor vehicle crashes, suicides and homicides. In New Mexico, we rank sixth, third and ninth in these causes of teen deaths nationally, respectively.

We can no longer afford to consider underage drinking as an inevitable rite of passage.

So why is it that New Mexico’s flagship university is fighting to be able to send absolutely the wrong message to kids who attend Lobo basketball games?

The people who live directly east of the football stadium have had issues with drunken tailgaters from time immemorial. Their issues have been noise, cars blocking driveways, people urinating and puking on lawns, drunken drivers driving on neighborhood streets and belligerent drunks — the latter three being directly related to the kegging that goes on before games in the parking lot across the street.

This is why a fence was built between the parking lot and Buena Vista Avenue about six years ago.

Although increasing stadium-area alcohol consumption won’t increase direct neighborhood interactions with Pit drinkers, it is likely to increase drunken behavior, including driving while intoxicated, through their community after a game. They have enough of that during tailgating even though APD and UNMPD actively work to prevent problems.

This will just give police more to do. Who will pay for the overtime? UNM?

On top of all of this, there’s the direct positive correlation between alcohol use and rape (especially “date rape”), incest, murder and every other violent crime. Thirty-six percent of criminal offenders were drunk when they committed their crimes.
Giving The Pit a license to sell alcohol is a bad idea.
It will increase our already out-of-hand underage drinking problem, increase surrounding neighborhoods’ issues with UNM and make New Mexico’s reputation for out-of-control alcohol abuse worse.

Let’s hope the city is able to continue to block it from happening.

Hernandez is a UNM graduate student and former GPSA council chair.