Minnesota Institute of Public Health

In many environments, the consequence of our plans is different and sometimes quite the opposite of what we had intended. Take ATOD policy for example.

Remember many years ago when hospitals first became indoor smoke free? The legislation had the unintended effect of having visitors and incoming patients approach the hospital front doors and see fifteen to twenty nursing and other health care staff in hospital scrubs, standing outside the front door, smoking. Oops. Policy was tweaked to move people fifty to a hundred feet away from the front door, eventually off the campus completely; lessons were learned and eventually, the policy got to where it needed to go. It was a classic profile of the difference between legislative intent, and legislative consequence.

Very recently, the news profiled the pacific Coast Beach areas near San Diego, and the experience of local policy makers attempting to reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption by adults and young adults along the public beach areas. Local lawmakers last year passed an ordinance prohibiting alcohol consumption of any kind along the beach, and the beach was defined as something like "the land immediately adjacent to the ocean surf". Result: hundreds maybe even thousands of people organized floating inner tubes and rafts, air mattresses etc connecting to each other just a few feet to hundreds of feet off the shoreline and into the water, equipped with cooler filled beer and other alcoholic beverages. Dubbed "Floatopias" by local media, the battle between policy makers and  party goers was afoot. You can just envision what the (just off the) beach area looked like.

The immediate unintended consequence was, now there were sun-drenched, partying, liquored up people floating in the ocean surf rather than walking on the ocean beach. Hmmm.

So the next move appears to be by policymakers re-defining prohibited alcohol use by "bathers in proximity of the ocean beach, surf area, etc"...

Thomas Jefferson is smiling, and subsequent policy makers and citizens celebrate a country trying to figure it out safely, sensibly, and democratically.

- JJ