Tilting at Gin Mills Becomes New Passion of Former Drunk

It was the most mechanical of matters: A restaurant in the city of San Fernando was reopening under new ownership. To sell drinks, the owner needed to apply for a state liquor license. To get that, she first had to pick up a conditional use permit from City Hall. A pro forma public hearing before the city Planning Commission was scheduled.

Only this time, a dozen residents who live near the restaurant came out to protest. They complained that there were already too many places to buy alcohol in their part of town--and too many intoxicated men and teen-agers roaming nearby streets.

“We are up to here!” said one elderly woman who has lived her entire life on a street near the restaurant, running a finger across her neck to emphasize her point.

The commissioners were surprised. A neighborhood decrying the social impact of a new bar or liquor store has become commonplace. But who would suggest that selling beer, wine and liquor inside a restaurant encourages alcohol abuse?

Ray Chavira would.

Chavira, an abrasive, 53-year-old recovered alcoholic and club-wielding member of what he calls “the new temperance movement,” had helped the San Fernando residents organize. Armed with moral arguments and statistics, Chavira had driven across Los Angeles this night from his home in Lynwood, the same way he had plunged into countless other City Council chambers, health seminars and government hearings during the last several years.

“Society and this particular community don’t need any more alcohol,” Chavira told the commission. “We have to reduce availability. What you may or may not be doing tonight is opening up another faucet.”

The closure of faucets dominates Chavira’s life. As an appointed member of the Los Angeles County and California advisory commissions on alcoholism, he is supposed to seek ways to battle the disease. Instead, employing a zealousness that has alienated many others within the alcoholism-prevention community, he has made it his life’s mission to rage against “the alcoholization of our society.”

Chavira belongs to a small, unaffiliated group of activists and researchers who believe that traditional strategies for prevention--treatment centers, tougher prison sentences and heavy publicity about alcohol’s dangers--will not work without new laws that make it harder--and more expensive--for people to drink.

These new temperance advocates want to ban beer and wine ads on television, or at least require that health warnings be given equal air time. They want to raise California and federal liquor taxes--largely untouched since the 1950s, thanks to effective liquor industry lobbying--to make up for the cost-of-living increases of the last several decades.

They want to ban the “happy hour,” prohibit the sale of alcohol at gas stations, slap health warnings on all containers and ban tax deductions associated with the use of alcoholic beverages for business purposes.

“No longer have we got time to only talk about facts and figures and what alcohol can do to you,” said Chavira, a short, stocky man with thinning hair. “We have to meet our own temptations. I’m not a prohibitionist--I think alcohol should be legal--but I think we can’t make it too easy on us.”

Whether the question before the house is the proposed sale of wine at a gas station, a liquor license for a mini-market beside a gas station or a beer license for a pool hall located next to a mental health clinic, Chavira is there, trying to convince an audience of the link between limiting the availability of alcohol and decreasing social problems caused by it.

He hammers at the financial burdens imposed on taxpayers by drinking-related crime and violence, frequently citing a recent county administrative office report that misuse of alcohol costs county government an estimated $320 million a year.

He complains that the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control “no longer has a night shift” to guard against sales of alcohol to minors, noting that the number of ABC investigators has almost been cut in half during the last decade.

He badgers residents’ groups to pressure their local governments to impose new zoning restrictions on businesses that sell alcohol.

He makes his way with the fervor of a preacher: “This society hasn’t dared to face moral questions. It’s materialistic; it’s greedy; it’s gluttonous.”

In a town like San Fernando, where a high percentage of the population is Latino, he bluntly characterizes his own Latino culture as hopelessly wedded to drinking: “We have a culture that tends to feature beer, women and song. . . . We tend to have fun and games. We live more for the present than the future. . . . The Latino community is so much involved with booze, we’re a drag on everybody else.”

He wears his fondest wish on the personalized license plate of his maroon Cadillac: SINTAXS.

“The greatest single prevention strategy,” he contends, “is to raise the booze tax high enough so there are enough people--particularly young people--dissuaded from purchasing.”

James Mosher, associate director for policy studies of the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, said Chavira “was kind of a lone wolf five years ago. But today there’s an increasing body of research that shows that if you don’t change the hostile environment--where the drinking takes place with all these social cues that encourage people to drink without thinking of the consequences--you can’t change their behavior.”

Ken Estes, an executive of CompCare, a Newport Beach-based treatment corporation that has spent the last year trying to form a national grass-roots citizens group to lobby for new temperance-style measures, said Chavira is a strong candidate to be the group’s executive director.

“My God, this guy goes at it 16 hours a day,” Estes said. “He works and works and works.”

Yet Chavira’s struggle is a lonely and often quixotic one. Consider, for example, what happened in San Fernando.

On the night that Chavira and the protesting residents appeared, they convinced two of the four planning commissioners to vote against the restaurant’s conditional use permit to sell alcohol.

One of those commissioners, James Hansen, admitted to the audience that he had “sat up here mechanically approving these (permits) for six years” and that “if these people hadn’t been here, this would have been a 4-0 vote.”

Instead, Hansen said near the close of the two-hour hearing, “Now I’m thinking: My job is to represent these people. These people are saying, ‘I live in the neighborhood.’ If we don’t listen to the public, why have public hearings?”

The 2-2 tie vote meant the permit was denied. The restaurant owner appealed to the City Council, which asked the Planning Commission to rehear the case in an attempt to break the deadlock.

Another public hearing was scheduled, and this time the protesters did not show up, but numerous supporters of the restaurant owner did. And this time, in ironic testament to Commissioner Hansen’s words, the vote was 4-0 to approve the conditional use permit.

Chavira’s mannerisms set him off from mainstream alcoholic prevention advocates as much as his positions do. He speaks with off-putting directness and self-certainty, qualities he says stem from a boyhood goal to be a lawyer or a politician--a dream destroyed by a quarter-century of boozing.

“He’s basically a radical,” complained a fellow member of the county’s 15-member Commission on Alcoholism, a collection of businessmen, professors, tavern owners and recovered alcoholics appointed by the Board of Supervisors. “What he would like to do, without saying it, is abolish the sale of alcohol all together.”

“What Ray’s trying to do is a very hard sell,” admitted Mark Sektnan, legislative aide to state Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim), who this spring authored an unsuccessful bill--opposed by the alcohol industry--to double the number of ABC investigators by adding a surcharge to annual state liquor licenses. (Sektnan said a 1982 study made at the request of the Legislature said the number of investigators should be increased by 240, about 165% more than the current staff of 147.)

Chavira spends his days as an employee of the county Probation Department’s personnel department, working as a liaison between department managers and the county’s Employee Assistance Program for workers troubled by alcohol, drugs or other problems.

He is, by his own account, an expert.

He said he began drinking at 17 and kept it up steadily through the military, college and 16 years as a public schoolteacher in Los Angeles and San Bernardino.

“My bosses never knew I was an alcoholic, but I’d use up all my sick leave on Monday mornings, that kind of thing. Meanwhile, at one point I was teaching a driver training course that included warning youngsters about the evil of alcohol. I was a supreme hypocrite with respect to that.”

He left teaching to work as an assistant director of a Florida teacher association in 1973 but, “having drunk myself almost to death there,” was quickly fired. He drove back to California with his wife and checked into a state mental hospital’s alcoholism recovery unit.

His first paying job after drying out was to train other recovered alcoholics and addicts as counselors in East Los Angeles. The next year the federally funded program was cut, and one day Chavira slipped back.

“I had a little hurt,” he said, mocking his weakness. “My oldest daughter graduated from grammar school, and I thought she didn’t pay enough attention to me afterwards. So I went out. It was a hot day, and I bought a bottle, and I came back feeling better. She had paid too much attention to her kid friends. Now, who was the kid ? That’s part of the addiction syndrome. We remain grown-up little boys.”

Shortly after, Chavira said, he stopped drinking for good. He is divorced and estranged from his children (“they don’t look me up”), but feels moving through him “a spirit to try to awaken people. I guess it’s a form of therapy. I feel like a prophet trying to tell everybody, ‘repent before it’s too late.’ ”

Even those who admire Chavira believe that his passion too often “turns off a lot of people,” said Bob Medina, who runs a private counseling service for alcoholics.

“Ray is very committed, and he has a lot of energy,” Medina said. “He has the energy of a Candy Lightner (the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving), but he doesn’t have an organization like MADD.”

Many advocates of new temperance measures believe MADD quickly captured the nation’s imagination because it aimed at a visible, highly emotional issue--the punishment of convicted drunken drivers.

By contrast, when it comes to raising taxes to discourage drinking, “self-interest isn’t as clearly identifiable,” admitted George Hacker, director for alcohol policies at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, which supports such measures. “In fact, many people might be against those taxes unless they take the long view. The fact is that two-thirds of all adults drink less than two drinks a week and wouldn’t be hurt. The tax will fall on the shoulders of those who should pay.”

“What MADD did with penalties for drunk driving, we’re going to have to do on availability issues,” Berkeley alcoholism analyst Mosher said. “We have to be in Sacramento pounding on doors and explaining this means votes.”

Added Chavira, “People are out there. It’s just that we don’t know how to organize them. The alcohol industry is strong because we’re weak. We don’t have our act together.”