Georgetown Council Deceived

I have been reviewing the video of Georgetown's last City Council meeting, and checking the facts, and was thereby compelled to write what follows. On the 1st of December, Georgetown’s City Council was deceived by many of the opponents to Sunday alcohol sales at the first reading of the proposed ordinance to permit Sunday alcohol sales. Dr. Hambrick made a multitude of false causality statements. His references to child, domestic, and sexual abuse, along with his mention of fetal alcohol syndrome, are about ten times more likely to be associated with in-home drinking enabled by package sales rather than liquor-by-the-drink. Liquor by the drink tends to reduce these trends, as the necessary social atmosphere reduces the opportunity for abusive behavior. In citing fetal alcohol syndrome, Dr. Hambrick is entirely misleading as it is next to impossible that any responsible restaurant, bar, or server would serve alcohol to a known or obviously pregnant individual. Dr. Hambrick referred to alcohol as a gateway drug; in this, he is relatively alone in the medical and scientific community, as both the American Medical Association and the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse both declaim alcohol and cannabis, both, as gateway drugs. Sunday sales will not contribute to underage drinking, because we are talking about public consumption, whereas underage drinking requires some degree of privacy, which is facilitated, again, by package sales. Dr. Hambrick also mentions and praises Ed Tedder’s letter to the editor in the News-Graphic. Ed Tedder’s letter, as can be expected from this dry group, is as misleading as anything else presented by the opponents of Sunday sales. Seems Mr. Tedder sought to make finding the article he mentioned from the American Journal of Public Health difficult by not including its title. This may be because the referenced article and study refer to Sunday package sales in New Mexico only, and sheds no light on by the drink sales, which is the issue at hand. Dr. Hambrick conveniently neglected to mention that he is a minister at Faith Baptist Church. Wayne Lipscomb of Gano Baptist Church claimed that as a police chaplain in Boone County he was thankful that he knew that, because of that county’s dry Sundays, that Sunday was one day he would never have to notify a family of a loss of life due to alcohol. Lipscomb’s statement is misleading, because, during the twenty year period ending 2006, Boone County averaged one alcohol-related traffic fatality per year. So, of the 365 days available during the typical year, Lipscomb was relieved that that one day never fell on one of the 52 Sundays.  

The opponents brought no legitimate evidence to the harm caused by Sunday sales because they couldn’t find any. All reliable scientific studies available on by the drink sales on Sunday indicate two consequences: increased local revenues with no corresponding increase in alcohol-related tragedy.