Reducing Underage Alcohol Purchases in Your Community

A hot topic at Town Hall Meetings (THMs) to prevent underage drinking (UAD) has been how to limit youth access to alcohol. According to Monitoring the Future (PDF 971 KB), the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s annual survey of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students, 92 percent of high school seniors perceive alcohol as fairly easy or very easy to obtain. Despite efforts by States and communities to enforce the minimum drinking age, underage drinkers are able to obtain alcohol and many are able to purchase alcohol themselves. In some States, nearly 1 out of 5 underage drinkers is able to buy his or her own alcohol. We can assume that these buyers will share their purchases with friends, as 95 percent of young people report that they do not drink alone.

Encourage your community to follow up your THM by taking steps to reduce underage alcohol purchases. Demonstrated benefits of efforts to prevent underage purchases of alcohol include fewer young people attempting to purchase alcohol, fewer older teens providing alcohol to younger teens, less use of alcohol by underage drinkers, and fewer alcohol-related traffic injuries.

Several alcohol control policies are proving effective in reducing youth access to alcohol. Some policies, such as regular compliance checks, are aimed at making it harder for youth to purchase their own alcohol. Other options, such as keg registration, are designed to make it less likely that young people of legal age will purchase alcohol for underage youth. Even without legal measures, alcohol outlets may participate voluntarily in efforts to prevent UAD as a way to establish good community relations. 

The following options have a strong evidence base supporting their effectiveness. Some descriptions suggest ways your community might make the option more affordable to implement.

• Compliance checks can significantly reduce sales to minors by making it more difficult for youth to obtain alcohol and also by encouraging alcohol outlets to “police” themselves to prevent possible citations.
  
  Compliance checks are not necessarily costly to implement. To limit costs, your community may consider a local ordinance that allocates a percentage of the fines collected from noncompliant merchants to funding compliance checks. Community action groups also can be responsible for planning the checks and coordinating young people’s involvement, which will limit the time required by police to conduct checks.
  
  
• Responsible beverage server training refers to educating owners, managers, servers, and sellers at alcohol outlets about strategies to avoid selling alcohol to underage youth or to intoxicated patrons. Components of effective training to prevent UAD may include:

Review of State and local laws, regulations, and consequences for not complying with the minimum legal drinking age of 21. Importance of checking age identification of customers who appear under age 30. How to identify fake identification cards and what to do once a fake card is confiscated. How to recognize situations in which adults are buying alcohol for underage youth. How to refuse sales to underage youth and to adults who may supply alcohol to underage youth.

Some alcohol outlet managers may feel that a server training program is too costly for them to implement. In response, some communities have decreased the license fees for establishments that implement server training, which helps to offset the cost of training. Communities also may consider arranging trainings through local community colleges, the police department, or by funding a local server trainer.

• Keg registration laws (sometimes called keg tagging laws) require wholesalers or retailers to identify large-capacity keg sales by keg and purchasers. Some jurisdictions also require retailers to warn purchasers about laws against providing alcohol to minors. Keg registration acts as a deterrent to UAD because adults may be more reluctant to provide alcohol to minors when the minors’ source of alcohol can be traced back to them. Keg registration generally is low cost, particularly if an outlet voluntarily adopts it and designs its own process.
  
  
• Higher pricing of alcohol makes it less affordable for young people. One policy that has been used to raise the price of alcohol is to increase the excise tax on alcohol. The evidence that higher pricing reduced underage consumption is so strong that the National Academy of Sciences recommended in Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility that Congress and State legislatures should increase alcohol excises taxes to curb underage drinking.

Current alcohol control policies vary by State, and you may need to check on your State laws before initiating a local policy. All 50 States and the District of Columbia currently prohibit possession of alcoholic beverages by persons younger than 21; most also prohibit underage purchase and consumption of alcoholic beverages by minors. The NIAAA’s Alcohol Policy Information System can provide your State’s profile of underage drinking laws. See The NSDUH Report on State Estimates of Underage Alcohol Use and Self-Purchase of Alcohol (PDF 334 KB) to find out where your State ranks in the percentage of underage youth who are able to purchase alcohol.