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NIAAA Launches New Alcohol Policy Information System

Columns - Policy

Sunday, 30 November 2003

Alcohol-related public policy in the United States is extremely complex. Statutes, regulations, and case law established at the federal, state, and local levels of government address such diverse topics as, for example, the days and times when alcoholic beverages can be sold and the sizes of containers in which they can be offered for sale; taxes that apply to beverages sold in various containers and in different settings; legal liability for damages resulting from drunk driving; blood alcohol content (BAC) limits for drivers; required labeling on beverage containers, required signage in establishments that serve alcoholic beverages, and prohibited images in alcoholic beverage advertising; requirements for health insurance coverage of alcoholism treatment services; limits on exemptions to insurers’ liability for damages resulting from intoxication; and various alcohol-related policies that apply in specific contexts such as public housing, corrections, workplaces, and educational settings, to name a few.

Alcohol-related policies can have important effects on public health through their influence on alcohol consumption and a variety of other health-related behaviors and outcomes. For many areas of alcohol-related policy, however, relatively little is known about how the policy environment affects health. Although researchers have explored a few policy topics (e.g., taxes, BAC limits) in considerable detail, more and better research clearly is needed to understand the effects of alcohol-related policies and to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative policy approaches. Research advances in this area have been constrained in part by the uneven quality and limited availability of information on the policies that have been adopted in various jurisdictions.

Introducing the Alcohol Policy Information System
The new Alcohol Policy Information System (APIS) has been created to provide researchers and others with authoritative, detailed, and comparable information on a wide range of alcohol-related policies in the United States at the state and federal levels. Developed by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA, a component of the U.S. National Institutes of Health), the purpose of the APIS project is to encourage and facilitate research on the effects and effectiveness of alcohol-related policies, both singly and in combinations. APIS information is available to the public through the APIS Web site (http://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov), which provides user-searchable access to policy information at several levels of detail, including charts, maps, and summaries, as well as the full text of alcohol-related bills, statutes, and regulations.

History and structure of the APIS project
The APIS project has been developed over a period of several years. A feasibility study conducted for NIAAA in 1998 identified elements that could be incorporated in a project of this nature and the work that would be required to include them. An expert meeting convened in late 1999 provided advice to NIAAA from members of the scientific community on how to structure the project to be most useful to researchers. The planning phase culminated in September 2001 with the award, following a competitive bidding process, of a 5-year contract to establish, operate, and maintain the APIS. The prime contractor for the project is The CDM Group, Inc. of Chevy Chase, Md. The two major subcontractors on the project are the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation of Calverton, Md., and UrbanPlanet, LLC, an information technology firm in St. Paul, Minn. The legal research, social science, information technology, and project management expertise provided by these firms is supplemented by additional expert consultants who contribute to the project.

Limitations of APIS policy coverage
APIS provides information on a wide range of alcohol-related policies, but it is important for researchers and other users of APIS policy information to be aware of limitations on the kinds of policies that are covered by APIS. Because the primary purpose of the project is to support health-related research, APIS restricts coverage to policies that have a plausible relationship to alcohol consumption, drinking patterns, and other health-related behaviors and outcomes. However, APIS construes the definition of “alcohol-related policies” quite broadly, covering policies well beyond the traditional focus on alcoholic beverage control, taxation, and drunk driving. For example, APIS includes policies that bear on the delivery and financing of treatment and prevention services as well as alcohol-related policies pertaining to education, workplace, and corrections settings. Coverage is limited to policies established at the federal and state levels of government, and does not include local (i.e., county or municipal) government policies or policies established by military or tribal authorities. APIS covers both enacted laws and adopted regulations but does not include measures that have not yet become law (such as bills that have merely been introduced into a state legislature). Perhaps the most significant limitation is that APIS does not address policies established through case law, nor does it deal with interpretations of law provided by the courts. These limitations in policy coverage reflect the prioritization of project resources to maximize the usefulness of APIS as a tool for policy research.

APIS selected policy topics
Policy information in APIS is organized into two broad categories. The first, “Detailed Information on Selected Alcohol Policy Topics,” is the centerpiece of APIS’s services for researchers, providing in-depth comparisons of state policies on selected alcohol-related topics. Coverage of each policy topic includes a brief narrative description; a list of definitions (if necessary); a summary of relevant federal law (if any); tables comparing state policies on that topic (as of a particular date and/or over a period of time specified by the user); a brief explanation of variables used in creating these tables; notes explaining the limitations of the information provided; maps and charts; relevant statutory and regulatory text; and references to selected federal publications. Coverage of most topics begins as of January 1, 1998, and work is underway to extend the baseline back to 1990 for a selected subset of policies as well as to expand the number of topics covered.

For each topic, APIS legal researchers work with staff and consulting social scientists to identify the key policy elements that bear on the topic, which may vary from one jurisdiction to another. These elements are developed into carefully designed variables to reflect the key features of the selected policies in ways that can facilitate appropriate comparisons across states and over time, and that can be incorporated directly into analytical studies. The information is displayed in tables that allow the user to specify an “as-of” date for the policy or to show policy changes over a user-specified time period. Links to the relevant statutory language excerpts that underlie the variable coding are included in the tables. These tables can also be downloaded in a format suitable for importing into most statistical programs. In each format, additional explanatory notes and limitations are provided.

Archive of bills and regulations
The second main category of policy information provided in APIS is the Archive of Alcohol-Related Bills and Regulations. The archive provides information on every alcohol-related bill or regulation enacted or adopted in the United States (at either the state or federal level) beginning January 1, 2002. For each bill or regulation, there is a brief narrative summary, the full text of the bill or regulation, and the full text of the corresponding statutory or regulatory code section(s) as amended by that bill or regulation. Users can search for bills by alcohol policy area(s) or apply Boolean techniques to search the full text of laws and regulations; searches also can be restricted to specific jurisdictions, years, or law types.

The search interface in the archive allows users to identify bills and regulations that pertain to specific alcohol policy areas using the Alcohol Policy Classification System (APCS), which is an APIS-designed tool for organizing and retrieving bills and regulations. Each bill or regulation included in the archive is assigned by APIS legal researchers to one or more alcohol policy areas and, when applicable, to one or more cross-cutting policy dimensions. Alcohol policy areas are organized in the APCS into nine broad categories, each with one or two levels of subcategories. Similarly, the cross-cutting dimensions are grouped into five broad categories, each with one level of subcategories. The level of detail in the APCS reflects a trade-off between the need to identify bills and regulations that pertain to a specific issue of interest and the complexities of classifying legal information into highly specialized categories.

Ongoing work and developments
The APIS Web site was launched on June 22, 2003, with a presentation at the annual scientific meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism. It was also presented at the annual research meeting of AcademyHealth, an organization of health services and health policy researchers, and a full session at the 131st annual meeting of the American Public Health Association was devoted to APIS. Work is underway to expand the policy information available on the site, including adding topics to the detailed information section and updating policy topics already posted, and documenting changes to statutory and regulatory codes from policies enacted in 2003. Other work in progress will provide refinements to the APIS Web site and additional information for a selected subset of policies. Comments and suggestions from users are welcomed through the “Contact APIS” link on the APIS home page.

Gregory Bloss, MA, is a public health analyst in NIAAA’s Division of Epidemiology and Prevention Research. He serves as project officer for the Alcohol Policy Information System project.

This article is published in Counselor,The Magazine for Addiction Professionals, December 2003, v.4, n.6, pp. 72-73.