Many Sports Fans Exit Stadium Drunk
By Bill Hendrick
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD
Jan. 21, 2011 -- Upwards of 40% of people who attend professional baseball or football games leave the stadium with a positive blood alcohol level and 8% leave legally drunk, a new study suggests.
Researchers who gave breath tests to 362 attendees of 13 pro baseball and three football games say 60% had zero blood alcohol content upon leaving. Of the 40% who had positive blood alcohol content, 8% had blood alcohol content levels at or above the 0.08 limit for a classification of intoxicated.
The findings are most likely considerably conservative, according to the researchers, because many people leaving the games had no desire to take part in a breathalyzer test to determine if they had been drinking or to answer questions about the amount of alcohol they drank.
“Our sample size was small, partly because of the difficulty of getting fans to submit to a [blood alcohol content] test after a game,” Erickson says in a news release. “But if we assume that it represents individuals attending professional events, it means that on average about 5,000 attendees leaving one National Football League event would be above the legal [intoxication] limit for driving. That’s a lot of drunken individuals who could be involved in traffic crashes, assaults, vandalism, crime and other injuries.”
(More here.)
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD
Jan. 21, 2011 -- Upwards of 40% of people who attend professional baseball or football games leave the stadium with a positive blood alcohol level and 8% leave legally drunk, a new study suggests.
Researchers who gave breath tests to 362 attendees of 13 pro baseball and three football games say 60% had zero blood alcohol content upon leaving. Of the 40% who had positive blood alcohol content, 8% had blood alcohol content levels at or above the 0.08 limit for a classification of intoxicated.
The findings are most likely considerably conservative, according to the researchers, because many people leaving the games had no desire to take part in a breathalyzer test to determine if they had been drinking or to answer questions about the amount of alcohol they drank.
“Our sample size was small, partly because of the difficulty of getting fans to submit to a [blood alcohol content] test after a game,” Erickson says in a news release. “But if we assume that it represents individuals attending professional events, it means that on average about 5,000 attendees leaving one National Football League event would be above the legal [intoxication] limit for driving. That’s a lot of drunken individuals who could be involved in traffic crashes, assaults, vandalism, crime and other injuries.”
(More here.)
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