More Missoula police officers will be walking through bars all over the city. Extra patrol cars will visit underage parties. Youths in their late teens, working with police officers, will visit bars and convenience stores trying to buy liquor. Officers in street clothes will work side-by-side with bouncers to help them hone their skills at spotting fake IDs and turning away potential underage drinkers. Billboards and fliers will remind parents that they're No. 1 on the prevention list. And new sixth-graders and ninth-graders will get training in how to say "no."
Missoula's new strategy is to blanket the city and smother the underage drinking problem.
Much of the new effort will be paid for by a new Enforcing Underage Drinking Laws grant from the Montana Board of Crime Control. It will funnel more than $20,000 to the Missoula Police Department to buy officers on overtime. It will also pay for alcohol compliance checks, in which stores and bars will be tested with underage youths trying to buy alcohol or to be served.
The effort is not a mean-spirited attempt at entrapment, said Missoula Police Capt. Marty Ludemann. It's meant to get the entire community to cooperate in the effort against underage drinking.
"We're not going to try to go out and try to trick anybody or try to make money for the city," he said. "That's not what we're doing."
In fact, police staff will let all liquor retailers know about the quarterly checks before they do them. The first couple of times a business fails to ask a youth for identification or agrees to serve a minor, the business will get just a warning.
"I'd rather just show the owner what's going on in his bar," Ludemann said. "Just say, 'Look, here's the law.' "
"It's just a little different approach to it," he said. "Trying to help them do things right instead of catching them doing things wrong."
The public will see large numbers of patrol cars on key nights of the next year, including the weekend of the Grizzly-Bobcat football game and other football weekends, cross-town high school sports events and prom nights.
The effort includes elected officials from the Missoula County commissioners to the Missoula City Council to parents to alcohol retailers to schools to addiction agencies to law enforcement and justice, said Frakie. It's coordinated by Missoula Underage Substance Abuse Prevention, which is a coalition that's under the umbrella of the Forum for Children and Youth.
MUSAP launched its new initiative, Keep Our Youth Alcohol Free, this spring. The grant money goes into use Sept. 1.
Missoula County has the highest rate of underage drinking in the state, and Montana has the fourth highest rate in the country, Frakie said. The Missoula County rate is 12 percent to 17 percent higher than the national average; nearly one-third of eighth-graders and two-thirds of 12th-graders reported drinking in the past 30 days in the 2002 Montana Prevention Needs Assessment survey. Of those, the majority reported drinking five or more drinks at one sitting.
"It's especially concerning because in that age group even moderate drinking has permanent effects," Frakie said.
Until recent years, scientists believed that human brain development took place during the first couple of years of life, said Peg Shea, director of Turning Point addiction services agency, which is a member of MUSAP. Now, we know that the brain continues to refine itself from the midteens through young adulthood, "pruning" its processes and developing its decision-making ability. Early alcohol use damages that process. And it is a predictor of future addiction, Shea said.
Kids today are drinking earlier and drinking more, in part because of the influence of marketing of sweet alcoholic drinks, she said. Nationally, across-the-community coalitions are forming to counter the commercial messages to kids and to protect them by giving them strengths and resilience. Great Falls, Billings, Bozeman and Kalispell all do alcohol-law compliance checks.
"Communities across the country are taking this on, setting standards and saying it's illegal," Shea said. "We're going to hold kids accountable, we're going to hold parents accountable."
Parents are the easiest place to get alcohol - as one MUSAP brochure says, "The easiest place for kids to get beer is right next to the milk" - but they're also the best deterrent.
"Parents are the No. 1 prevention tool," Shea said. "Talk with your kids. Know who they are. Know who their friends are. Be clear. Have standards."
MUSAP is supporting the effort with parents' tip sheets and brochures. Its staff and volunteers are also working toward introducing a state keg registration law at the next Legislative session. The law would require the purchaser of a keg of beer to register as the buyer and to accept responsibility for it. MUSAP has asked the City of Missoula to join other cities in support of such a law.
MUSAP is also studying a teen party law that would hold parents responsible for providing alcohol to minors even without an injury or fatality. And Frakie hopes to see more employees at the Safe Kids/Safe Communities Responsible Beverage Server Training workshops in Missoula.
The Board of Crime Control money will also allow the police department to contract with the University of Montana Curry Health Center Health Promotion office, which will educate students about alcohol laws and the consequences of breaking them.
The teenage years are difficult ones for alcohol law enforcement in Montana because of ambivalence in adults. Many see drinking as part of the rites of passage. That just doesn't wash anymore, said Shea.
"The analogy I use is 20 years ago, who wore seat belts?" she said. "Now, everybody's wearing seat belts because we know more. We know more now about the effects of alcohol on the developing brain."
Reporter Ginny Merriam can be reached at 523-5251 or at gmerriam@missoulian.com
If you're interested
If you have questions about the Keep Our Youth Alcohol Free initiative, call the Missoula Forum for Children and Youth office at 258-3798.
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