ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTION Effect of Community-Based Interventions on High-Risk Drinking and Alcohol-Related Injuries

ALCOHOL INTOXICATION IN-creases the risk of injury re-sulting from motor vehiclecrashes and violent as-saults.1 There is increasing evidence of a causal link between the availability of alcohol and traffic crashes2 and as-saults3 in community settings. Previ-ous evaluations of community-based programs to prevent alcohol-related in-juries have focused specifically on fa-tal motor vehicle crashes4 or special populations, such as youth.5,6 We re-port an evaluation of a comprehen-sive, community-based environmen-tal intervention to reduce rates of alcohol-related injuries resulting from motor vehicle crashes and assaults. METHODS A 5-year community alcohol trauma prevention trial was conducted from 1992 through 1996 to determine the ef-fect of environmental prevention strat-egies on alcohol-related injury in 3 intervention communities. The inter-vention and comparison communities were each approximately 100000 in population in northern California, southern California, and South Caro-lina. The communities were racially and ethnically diverse and incorpo