I shared the comments on ethnicity and DUI with some of my colleagues at the Prevention Research Center, who found them interesting. Paul Gruenewald noted that a forthcoming paper by Fred Johnson and colleagues in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol did not find a pattern of later drinking onset among blacks [Johnson, F.W.; Gruenewald, P.J.; Treno, A.J.; and Taff, G.A., "Drinking over the life course within gender and ethnic groups: A hyperparametric analysis." JSA, in press]. Paul also said: "We have published a paper [Gruenewald, P.J.; Mitchell, P.R.; and Treno, A.J. (1996), "Drinking and driving: Drinking patterns and drinking problems," Addiction, 91(11):1637-1649] that shows that black and hispanic drinking driving is relatively infrequent when compared to white driving after drinking, and that this is largely due to (a) differences in drinking patterns (white drinking most frequently) and (b) preferential use of different drinking venues among some drinkers (e.g., bars and restaurants). The economic efficiency argument we have already made (and demonstrated to be true) in an earlier paper in the literature [Gruenewald, P.J.; Treno, A.J.; Nephew, T.M.; and Ponicki, W.R. (1995), "Routine activities and alcohol use: Constraints on outlet utilization," Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 19(1):44-53]. There we show that more frequent drinkers do conserve costs by drinking more at home. But, nevertheless, heavier drinkers (those who drink more per occasion) are more likely to drink outside the home (and therefore drink and drive) (in another paper to be submitted later this year). Please note that all these observations net out income and other time-energy budget effects (so the basic economic argument proposed by the ATHG members is without much force; there are economic effects but they are not all-encompassing). It should be noted that statistically controlling for income and time-energy budgets is an essential step in interpreting these data (see references above). Without such controls basic cross-tabs wildly exaggerate differences between ethnic groups."