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Providing Treatment, Cutting Access Can Curb Alcohol-Related Crashes
April 29, 2005

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Research Summary

Making addiction treatment more available and alcohol less accessible can help reduce alcohol-related traffic deaths, according to new research from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).

Researcher Ralph Hingson of the Boston University School of Public Health and colleagues looked at alcohol-related crashes in communities that received Fighting Back grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which supported a decade-long environmental-prevention project that targeted alcohol and other drug abuse. The researchers found that those communities that undertook concerted efforts to reduce alcohol -- such as increasing publicly funded treatment, establishing awareness campaigns about treatment services, initiating hospital-based alcohol screening and referral, conducting responsible-service training, and enacting ordinances to prohibit public drinking -- experienced reductions in fatal alcohol-related crashes.

"These results show that concentrated, community-wide interventions can save lives," said NIAAA Director Ting-Kai Li, M.D. "This is the first study to explore the effect of the combined use of increased individually-oriented substance-abuse treatment and environmental strategies to reduce alcohol availability."

Added Hingson: "As research further defines the types of community interventions that successfully reduce alcohol-related problems, communities can focus on intervention strategies likely to produce desired results. Community organizing interventions may not be sufficient to reduce alcohol-related problems unless they specifically identify and implement proven interventions or those that have a plausible rationale for reducing alcohol problems."

The research appears in the April 2005 issue of the journal Injury Prevention.

Hingson, R., Zakocs, R., Heeren, T., Winter, M., Rosenbloom, D., & DeJong, W. (2005) Effects on alcohol related fatal crashes of a community based initiative to increase substance abuse treatment and reduce alcohol availability. Injury Prevention, 11(2): 84-90.

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