Editorial: Happy hour at the grocery store?

Tuesday, June 14, 2005 | 8:54 a.m.

Gov. Kenny Guinn has signed into law a bill sponsored by state Sen. Mike Schneider, D-Las Vegas, that will enable grocery stores in Nevada to provide samples of alcoholic drinks to their customers who are at least 21. We can just see it now. Parents, with children in tow, will have a "sample" for the road before leaving the store and getting into their car to drive away. What a message that sets for the kids -- and the potential danger once the customer gets behind the wheel. The bill doesn't define how many ounces of alcohol constitute a sample and how often a customer can go back for more. The new law will leave it up to local governments to regulate grocery stores that want to provide samples of alcohol.

Compare the Nevada Legislature's decision not to set guidelines to a recently passed law in Arizona that permits grocery stores to allow alcoholic drinks to be sampled. According to a story in the Arizona Daily Star newspaper in Tuscon, samples there will be limited to 3 ounces of beer, 1 ounce of wine or a half-ounce of liquor each day per customer. And each store can have just 12 sampling events every year and each of them can last no more than three hours. Even with these restrictions, local law enforcement officials in Arizona are worried because there is no stopping someone from driving to a number of grocery stores to get free alcohol.

Because 40 other states already permit some sampling of alcoholic drinks in grocery stores, and since drinking is so prevalent in Nevada, some might wonder what's the big deal. But the fact is we already have a problem with drinking and driving, and we don't need to make it worse by handing out samples of alcohol to grocery store customers. Furthermore, it's bad enough that slot machines and cigarette smoking are allowed in grocery stores, but was it really necessary to add alcohol-drinking adults to the equation as an example we want to set for our children?