Street Drinking Bans Punish Harmless Behaviour to Comfort Voters

Some visitors who went to the US to watch the World Cup were surprised by the fact that in most of the country, drinking alcohol in public is illegal. Other people are familiar with the concept, since similar bans exist in many other countries. In mine, Hungary, there is no national ban, but many municipalities have such local rules. There are also countries with more lenient rules, such as Germany or Austria.

The results vary, but before examining a prohibition’s effectiveness, we need to make sure it’s justified and proportionate, and I find the popular arguments lawmakers use to justify street drinking bans quite weak. Such as claims that alcohol consumption in public spaces is often accompanied by rowdiness and problems with public cleanliness. Bans have been implemented based on that premise, which is why the municipality has banned drinking in many of Budapest’s districts.

By doing so, they are only trying to mitigate a part of these very real problems, while also punishing completely harmless behaviours. Let’s start with rowdiness! In Hungary, as well as in plenty of other countries, disturbing the peace is a standalone offence. In my country, both the police and local government authorities can issue fines for it, which is also common in other countries. It doesn’t require policing behaviours that might lead to being noisy. 

For instance, I would be annoyed if my neighbours blare music at 3 AM, but I don’t want them to be preventively prohibited from buying electronic devices with a speaker. Punishing anyone who drinks in public spaces, even if they do it silently, applies the same logic. Walking with your baby, your dog, or just hanging out with other people can be noisy. Should these elements of urban life also be preventively banned?

To support this solution, you don’t simply need to assume that most of the time, people are noisy on the streets because they are drunk, but also that they often get drunk while being outside. They can drink at home, and pub terraces often get exemptions from such laws. I have the same problem with banning alcohol sales after certain hours with similar intentions. Did lawmakers forget about the fact that people store stuff at home?

Public urination, not surprisingly, is also (usually) a punishable offense, typically with a fine. I could start over with the same argument, saying that not everyone who relieves themselves on the street does it because they drank alcohol, and not everyone who just had two beers while sitting in a square will do so.

But rather, I’d suggest that this is not primarily a policing problem, but one of a lack of enough public toilets. Municipalities should allocate resources to maintain more of them to solve the very real problem of stinky pavements. While, indeed, people are frequently more uninhibited while drunk, no matter what you drink and how polite you are, there is a point when you don’t have time to find a McDonald’s. 

To talk about other types of public cleanliness problems, people also tend to litter for many reasons; while drinking from aluminium cans leaves no broken glass on the pavement – and, according to my experience in Budapest, a deposit system does a pretty good job of collecting them to recycle.

Others may name preventing hooliganism, fights, and vandalism as their goal – things that are also obviously illegal with or without drinking. Shibuya City, a self-governed district within Tokyo which banned drinking on streets or in public places from 6 PM to 5 AM to curb bad behaviour, mentioned the damage, altercations, and littering caused by over tourism and drinking in the street in a previous statement. 

When their prohibition became permanent, Mayor Ken Hasebe told journalists that they would prefer people to enjoy their drinks inside restaurants. I guess they count on hospitality workers not to sell more alcohol after a certain level of inebriety, which probably works to some extent. However, even considering this, it still bans a normal activity that may lead to something illegal. 

Regarding alcohol-fuelled antisocial behaviour, London’s Camden has a way more balanced approach. There, police and council enforcement officers can order people to stop drinking alcohol and to confiscate their beverages if they engage in antisocial behaviour. They can also be fined if they refuse to comply, but this measure is not an outright ban on drinking in public.

According to an article by HRB National Drugs Library, one reason for the bans is that many citizens fear street drinkers, and such laws “can serve to bolster perceptions of safety and restore perceptions of moral order.” That’s the main thing. Such measures are a part of the security theatre that many lawmakers offer to comfort some of their voters.

So we need to clearly ask whether any behaviour that is, in itself, harmless to others can be banned because it may lead to something actually problematic. The same applies to the punishment of possessing illicit drugs, even if you only use them yourself without hurting anyone else. At the end of the day, the question is not simply if you can drink on your city’s streets, but if there is anyone who challenges whether the rules that a lot of people have gotten used to make any sense at all.

Image: Unsplash/Csaba Talaber

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