Effectiveness
According to a 2004 comparison by YAERD, a U.S. organization that studies alcohol use among youth, Michigan and Alaska, whose dram shop laws are considerably narrower than MADD proposes, have drunk-driving fatality rates below the national average, while Illinois is above the national average despite having one of the broadest dram shop laws. Comparisons between a rural state like Alaska, with the lowest population density in the United States, with that of Illinois, which includes the Chicago metropolitan area and other major cities, may not be scientifically valid because of the existence of confounding variables. A 1993 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found some reduction in alcohol-related fatalities from the implementation of dram shop laws though it did not control for the special cases of Utah and Nevada, which may have distorted the results.
Read more about this topic: Dram Shop