Back in January 2020, I posted about some of my research (with Matt Roskruge of Massey University and Peter Miller of Deakin University) on pre-drinking and the night-time economy. The main aspects of that research are now forthcoming in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review (but you can read an ungated report on the research here). As a supplementary research question, we looked at the prevalence of side-loading (which we defined as the consumption of alcohol during a night out or event, occurring at a location other than a licensed venue or a private home). Side-loading has received much less research attention than pre-drinking, and that may be because most entertainment precincts in western developed countries have liquor bans or public drunkenness laws in place that should limit the extent of that behaviour.
Now, our research on side-loading has just been published in the journal Addictive Behaviors Reports (for ungated results, see the earlier HPA report on our research here). Based on our sample of 469 pedestrians randomly sampled from people out in Hamilton's night-time economy, we found that:
A large majority (84.4%) of the research participants had engaged in pre-drinking, meaning that 93.8 percent of those who had consumed any alcohol that day had been pre-drinking.
Compared with pre-drinking, a substantially smaller proportion of research participants had engaged in side-loading (82/469 = 17.8% of research participants, and 82/413 = 19.9% of drinkers). Of those engaging in side-loading, the majority did so in a car (61.0%), with smaller proportions engaging in side-loading in the street (17.1%), a carpark (12.2%), or somewhere else (13.4%).
So, while side-loading is nowhere near as prevalent as pre-drinking, it was still engaged in by over one in six people, and often in cars or in carparks. We also found that men were significantly more likely to engage in side-loading than women, and pre-drinkers were more likely to side-load than non-pre-drinkers. The second surprising thing we found was a lack of an association between side-loading and intoxication (as measured by breath alcohol content, measured using a breathalyser):
...engaging in side-loading behaviour is not statistically significantly associated with breath alcohol content in any of the models. The coefficient is small, and the sign is inconsistent across models. In contrast, pre-drinking is statistically significantly associated with higher breath alcohol content... pre-drinking is associated with 258 mcg/L higher breath alcohol content when considering the full sample, and 167 mcg/L higher breath alcohol content in the sample of drinkers.
How is it that pre-drinkers are more intoxicated than non-pre-drinkers, whereas side-loaders are not more intoxicated than non-side-loaders? We hypothesise that:
...as the overall effect on intoxication was not significant, it is possible that side-loading is not used as a method for drinkers to enhance intoxication, but may merely be a means of sustaining a target level of intoxication... As drinkers may use side-loading as a substitute for purchasing drinks at a bar or night club, the number of drinks consumed in total (and hence intoxication) may not change, only the location of the drinking. This potential role of side-loading as a substitute may arise through the same price-disparity mechanism that contributes to pre-drinking behaviour, i.e. the large disparity in the price of alcohol between on-licence outlets (night clubs, bars, or restaurants) and off-licence outlets (bottle stores, or supermarkets)...
Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, side-loading wasn't the main focus of our research, and so we couldn't really answer questions of why side-loading was so prevalent in our sample. Our next forays into the night-time economy are going to have to look at side-loading behaviour in greater detail.
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