Impacts of New Zealand's lowered minimum purchase age on context-specific drinking and related risks.

Aims: The minimum purchase age (MPA) for alcohol in New Zealand (NZ) was reduced from 20 to 18 years in 1999. We assessed the degree to which this change was associated with alterations in uses of drinking contexts, drinking and related problems.

Methods: NZ National Alcohol Surveys among people 14+ years of age provided demographics, frequencies and amounts consumed in drinking places, and problem measures for 1995, 2000 and 2004.

A review of alcohol and other drug control policy research.

Objective: This article provides a historical review of alcohol and other drug policy research and its impact on public health over the past 75 years. We begin our summary with the state of the field circa 1940 and trace the development across the subsequent decades. We summarize current thinking and suggest possible future directions the field of alcohol and other drug policy may take.

Assessing the Validity of On-Premise Alcohol License Data in Six Communities in California: Operating Characteristics and Outlet Densities.

This study evaluated State of California alcohol license records as a measure of businesses selling alcohol for consumption on premise. In 2008, researchers attempted to visit all 799 licensed restaurants, bars, and pubs in six medium-sized cities near San Francisco. Surveys collected detailed business characteristics for a subsample of 151 bars or restaurants that included a separate bar area.

Minimum alcohol prices and outlet densities in British Columbia, Canada: estimated impacts on alcohol-attributable hospital admissions.

Objectives: We investigated whether periodic increases in minimum alcohol prices were associated with reduced alcohol-attributable hospital admissions in British Columbia.

Methods: The longitudinal panel study (2002-2009) incorporated minimum alcohol prices, density of alcohol outlets, and age- and gender-standardized rates of acute, chronic, and 100% alcohol-attributable admissions. We applied mixed-method regression models to data from 89 geographic areas of British Columbia across 32 time periods, adjusting for spatial and temporal autocorrelation, moving average effects, season, and a range of economic and social variables.