Last week, amid the brief flurry surrounding a mercifully short-lived Utah Senate proposal that would have called for the electronic scanning of IDs from anyone who ever visited a bar or club in the state, there was a worrisome sensation that the road leading toward desperately needed liquor law reform in Utah was about to be abandoned.

However, Lisa Marcy, an attorney and spokesperson for the Utah Hospitality Association, believes that a meaningful resolution of the private club issue will be achieved by the end of the legislative session in March. While the process has at times been frustrating, Marcy admits, she adds that all parties concerned are looking for that essential “nexus” where eliminating private club memberships can be achieved along with effective, efficient measures that ensure such a move does not compromise the public safety or welfare in any way.

One hopeful indicator, she acknowledges, is the recent progress of proposed legislation that dramatically stiffens the penalties for underaged drinkers, leading up to and including the confiscation of driver’s licenses.

Meanwhile, on other aspects, the battle for normalization remains stubbornly entrenched in contentious perceptions — especially about imagined correlations between consumption and the visibility and accessibility of private clubs — which Marcy notes are based primarily on dubious statistics and lack of meaningful empirical evidence.

In an ABC-TV nationally-distributed report last week about the electronic scanning proposal, which would have included a provision for making the database available to law enforcement authorities, the tenor of the online comments provides compelling anecdotal evidence that hardly dilute perceptions about the state’s dysfunctional reputation when it comes to the bread-and-butter issues of hospitality. While many Utah residents have been habituated to the typical dynamics of this particular debate, the issue for those outside of Utah seems to reinforce their perceptions about the uptight peculiarities of the state.

Last June, I cited extensively a broad qualitative study of Utah’s business environments conducted by Real Estate Professionals for Economic Growth (RE-PEG) and Summit Group Communications. In particular, the report addressed, among other things, the rationale for normalizing Utah’s liquor laws.

To reiterate:

Perhaps the best way to view this process is “normalizing” the laws, which certainly does not affect nor dilute the state’s enforcement efforts.

The report suggests:

“By bringing these laws more in-line with other cities in the United States, it would make Utah easier to understand from an outsider’s point of view and may diminish some of the ‘myths of wackiness’ about Utah. But most interviewees felt that although it would impact the visits of people ‘trialing’ Utah, its impact on residents once here would be less dramatic (in very short time frames, people appear to adapt to the local environment to accommodate their chosen lifestyle).

“Given the expected cultural resistance to broad changes in these laws, one is left to wonder if the expected results would match the almost certain conflict and resistance to the changes.”

As Marcy suggests, there is a lot of unfounded rhetoric and certainly a vacuum of empirically-based information. For its part, Mothers Against Drunk Driving continues to mount an aggressive campaign to ensure that no change be made whatsoever to the state’s current private clubs.

In a position paper filled with statistics but without any particular demonstration of vetting with regard to statistical integrity when it comes to issues of validity and reliability (as mandated in any research-based protocol), MADD lays out its unconditional position:

“The Private Club Law is the foundation of our alcohol control system. Changing clubs into open bars is one of the most serious public safety issues we have ever faced, because it will not only increase adult consumption, it changes the social norm and sends a message to kids that alcohol is necessary to have fun and prosper and will increase underage drinking.”

MADD has its adherents in the state legislature and it makes every attempt to buttress its arguments with a superficially impressive canon of statistics and research citations. MADD lobbyists have no problem whatsoever in finding willing listeners among legislators who have taken an oath to act responsibly in the state’s best comprehensive interests of public welfare. Yet — as with so many issues in this state — the legislature is not known for its ready willingness to take such information and data with a dispassionate interest and to ask for proper context-driven interpretations of such positions.

Indeed, rare is the moment — especially among journalists and opinion leaders — where MADD representatives are asked to demonstrate in compelling empirical ways the connection between increased consumption and the removal of private club memberships.

There are plenty of experts who question MADD’s cavalier use of statistics. One such source is Dr. David Hanson, professor emeritus of sociology at SUNY-Potsdam. He has researched the issue of alcohol and drinking for more than 40 years, far longer than the period comprising MADD’s existence.

In an introduction to MADD, he notes:

“Unfortunately, Mothers Against Drunk Driving often uses junk science to promote its agenda. For example, a very brief three-page study by MADD former vice president Ralph Hingson made a statistical assertion in support of MADD’s policy agenda that the U.S. Department of Transportation had been unable to establish after 15 years of careful research. Even after the General U.S. Accounting Office issued a report to Congress insisting that the Hingson claim was “unfounded,” MADD continues to quote the unsubstantiated estimate as scientific fact.”

And, there is much, much more.

An exemplar of the dispassionate authority, Hanson hosts a comprehensive website that includes a great deal of material not just on MADD but also on virtually every other entity involved with the issue. As he says:

“This web site is another effort to expand alcohol knowledge beyond the ‘ivory tower.’

“As one who does not require outside research funding, Dr. Hanson is free to draw whatever conclusions logic dictates without regard to whomever might be either pleased or offended.

“The objective of this site is to provide information to stimulate thought and discussion about alcohol issues. It is informational only and nothing on it constitutes advice.”

A responsible, sober-minded discourse is needed. The private club membership issue is at the forefront of a sorely needed process for liquor law reform, an issue that has enormous economic implications as well as those concerned with the education of responsible and appropriate alcohol use and access.

Year after year, Utah often has managed double-digit increases in liquor sales. In the most recently completed fiscal year, the state saw sales grow by 11.8 percent over the previous year to nearly $257 million. And, the state government benefits enormously. Utah ranks in the top tier for alcohol taxes in the nation — in large part due to a requirement that 10 percent of all gross sales go directly to school lunch programs for low-income students.

And, meanwhile, club owners in the state must pay retail prices on their liquor and beer stocks. Two years ago, the state markup on distilled spirits and wine increased from 64.5 percent to 86 percent. The markup on heavy beer remains at 64.5 percent. Club owners are certainly entitled to a modicum of economic justice here as well.

Perhaps, more relevant to the debate above, consumption per capita was up only slightly over the previous year which means that the double-digit increases are being driven, in large part, by the state’s changing demographics which bring in a greater proportion of out-of-state and overseas visitors, business owners, and new residents who see the positive and negative aspects of the state’s ‘loaded’ perceptions about alcohol and other issues.

In fact, the authors of the earlier cited study also identified four “loaded” perceptions that work both positively for and negatively against the state’s interests. They are: the relative significant influence of the LDS Church on the state’s culture, government and business; complicated, strict liquor laws making it difficult to buy and consume alcohol; a conservative, Norman Rockwell-like monoculture, and the challenges of being a non-LDS single person. Of these loaded perceptions, the authors noted that the last one was the most change-limited perception.

On the question of sharing perceptions of Utah, the one most frequently cited as the first perception concerned the state’s liquor laws. Even Utah residents — as reflected in a poll conducted last month by Dan Jones and Associates for the Deseret News and KSL-TV — are swayed by Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.’s call for eliminating the private club rules. The poll found that 58 percent support eliminating private club membership requirements and 67 percent approve a proposed ban on minors from the bar areas of restaurants.

Perhaps we have crossed finally those resistant cultural barriers in the broader segments of Utah’s populace. The issue then is to frame the matter of liquor law reform in terms that balance substantively the mutual interests of those involved in the hospitality and tourism industries with those concerned about their own cultural sensitivities being usurped for purely singular interests.

Once again, the legislators need to play catch up with their constituents and not kowtow to a handful of activists who rely on the always-unproductive tactics of fear mongering and hyperbole designed more to protect their selfish lobbying interests than to enhance the genuine welfare of the state’s citizenry.