Four months after many campus-area bars volunteered to ban their weekend drink specials, several bar owners say their business has not been affected. They remain hopeful that the ban will prove that drink specials are not responsible for binge-drinking or crimes associated with alcohol.

“I’m hoping that the city will determine that it was not the specials that were causing the late night problem,” said Marsh Shapiro, owner of the Nitty Gritty. “Therefore, if some wanted to reinstate their drink specials, they may be able to do that. I’m not sure the Nitty Gritty would, since it has had virtually no impact on our business.”

State Street Brats manager Ross Johnson also said the ban has had minimal effect on the business. Johnson added that the ban has taken freedom of choice away from the students.

“In order to protect our business and make a statement to the city and the university, we had to step forward and do that. It has really hurt the students because this economic decision has made it more expensive to go to the bars,” said Johnson, who also noted that the Halloween riots occurred on a night when there were no drink specials, supported the bar-owners defense that alcohol-incited issues don’t stem from the bars.

“Thursday night there were plenty of drink specials available and thousands of people were out drinking with absolutely no problem,” Johnson said.

He said the thousands out on State Street Saturday night were not all drinking at the bars but instead at house parties and on the street.

Johnson also said that liquor stores, like Riley’s, sell more alcohol than several large downtown bars combined. Johnson believed that this alcohol goes to unregulated venues, like house parties, where binge-drinking and incidents of sexual assault, among other alcohol-related crimes, are a huge problem.

After the ban has been effective for a year, Johnson says that bar owners will ask the city police for results in order to see how the ban has affected alcohol-related crime downtown. If the reports show the owners were not to blame, they will resume exercising their right to do whatever promotions they wish.

Last May, the Robert Wood Johnson Project (renamed the PACE project) conducted a study linking drink specials to alcohol-related problems downtown. Bill Lugo, the project evaluator, said in May that the areas with the highest concentration of violations were not necessarily where students live. Lugo also said that the violations were not necessarily related to an area densely packed with liquor-licensed establishments.

Bullfeathers owner Dick Lyshek, said he is tired of hearing about drink-special bans. He added that because there has been little to no effect on many businesses, campus-area bar owners are trying to put behind them the erroneous charges by the university and the Alcohol License and Review Committee that their specials encourage binge-drinking and other crimes.