Background: Despite evidence of racialized and socioeconomic inequities in tobacco and alcohol outlet availability, few studies have investigated spatial inequities in areas experiencing both concentrated residential racialized segregation and socioeconomic disadvantage. This study examined whether segregation-racialized, economic or both-was associated with alcohol and tobacco retailer counts in North Carolina (NC).
Methods: The NC Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission provided lists of 2021 off-premise alcohol retailers. We created a list of 2018 probable tobacco retailers using ReferenceUSA. We calculated three census tract-level measures of the Index of Concentrations at the Extremes (ICE), indicating racialized segregation between non-Hispanic White and Black residents and economic segregation based on household income. We used negative binomial regression to test associations between quintiles of each ICE measure and tobacco and, separately, alcohol retailer counts.
Results: Tracts with the greatest racialized disadvantage had 38% (IRR, 1.38; 95% CI, 1.15-1.66) and 65% (IRR, 1.65; 95% CI, 1.34-2.04) more tobacco and alcohol outlets, respectively, as tracts with the lowest. Tracts with the highest racialized economic disadvantage had a predicted count of 1.51 tobacco outlets per 1000 people while those in the lowest had nearly one fewer predicted outlet. Similar inequities existed in the predicted count of alcohol outlets.
Discussion: Tobacco and alcohol outlet availability are higher in NC places experiencing concentrated racialized and economic segregation. A centralized agency overseeing tobacco and alcohol outlet permits and strategies to reduce the retail availability of these harmful products (e.g., capping the number of permits) are needed to intervene upon these inequities.
Keywords: Alcohol retail availability; Health inequities; Residential segregation; Structural racism; Tobacco retail availability.
© 2022. W. Montague Cobb-NMA Health Institute.