TAKE ACTION to STOP SB 620 - No Direct to Consumer Shipments in CA

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SB 620 (Allen) would make direct-to-consumer (DTC) shipping of distilled spirits and beer permanently legal in California, a major threat to public health and safety.

It creates a dangerous policy by:

• Fundamentally undermining the three-tier system, allowing all producers to also be distributors and retailers.
• Promoting DTC delivery of cheap, mass-market distilled spirits and beer by megacorporations.
• Failing in efforts to promote small, local producers over large, out-of-state ones.
• Incentivizing producers to deliver booze to peoples' doors in quantities that exceed any measure of "responsible" drinking.
• Making responsible beverage service difficult or impossible, and putting it on the shoulders of delivery drivers who are untrained and pressured to move on to the next doorstep.
• Stripping California of state control over its own alcohol market and sparking a race to the regulatory bottom.
• Making the state choose between gutting union jobs or increasing per capita consumption. (Or both.)

This increase in access to consumers, quantities consumed, and freedom from accountability comes at a time when alcohol harm is rapidly increasing in California. Damage from alcohol has been steadily rising for 20 years. Diagnoses of alcohol use disorder increased 50% from 2002 to 2012, and this has resulted in an alarming rise in alcohol-related deaths. Between 1999 and 2017, the raw number of alcohol deaths doubled, accounting for a 50% increase in death rate. This is not the result of long-term alcohol abuse; mortality rates among 25 to 34 year-olds saw annual increases between 4.6% and a staggering 12%. The annual rate of death from cirrhosis of the liver increased 10.5% between 2009 and 2016 in this same age group.

With these numbers in mind, efforts to radically expand alcohol markets have costs that far outweigh any perceived local economic benefit, even assuming that said benefit is not subsumed by multinational megaproducers. Tell your legislators to vote NO ON SB 620.