FRIDAY, March 14, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- How easily minors can buy alcohol apparently depends on one key factor: Location, location, location.
Undercover research shows that customers who appear intoxicated or underage can bypass laws banning alcohol sales to minors and inebriated patrons, but the ease with which they can buy liquor seems to depend on the neighborhood where the outlet is located. The findings appear in the March issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Researchers from the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, Calif., used undercover customers to scout out the selling practices of liquor stores, bars and restaurants in northern California.
They recruited drinking-age women who looked younger than 21 to buy alcohol in 146 liquor stores and they used male actors to play "drunks" at 135 bars and restaurants throughout the region. The male participants were accompanied by "minders" who made sure they gave a credible performance.
They discovered that the apparent minors were able to buy alcohol 39 percent of the time, while the seemingly intoxicated males were even more successful, with a 58 percent rate.
However, both types of customers were more successful in highly populated areas and in Hispanic neighborhoods. Male customers purchased the most alcohol from male servers who were under 30 years of age.
"In high-density areas, there's more people and so there's more outlets. With more alcohol outlets, there's more competition to get customers and retailers are willing to sell to whomever comes in to increase their profit margin," explains study author Bridget Freisthler, an associate research scientist at the Prevention Research Center.
The concentration of law-breaking establishments in Hispanic neighborhoods was more perplexing to the researchers, however.
"We're a bit baffled by the Hispanic neighborhoods [finding]. Minority neighborhoods tend to have higher concentrations of these outlets, so we're back to the higher population density question again," Freisthler says.
The findings, however, shed light on an important aspect of underage drinking -- how minors access alcohol. Young adults (aged 15 to 29) disproportionately represent the number of alcohol-related violent incidents recorded by police, note the authors.
"This study has public health importance because of the high number of problems that are associated with drinking, particularly among youth, such as traffic crashes, homicides and suicides," according to Rhonda Jones-Webb, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health.
But she did wonder whether, because the study segregated the two types of customers by gender, the results might have been different if the intoxicated customers had been female and the underage buyers had been male.
Information gleaned from the study should be used to tailor alcohol prevention messages targeted at specific communities and to improve enforcement, Freisthler says.
"We're working on parallel studies at this time to look at how we can we tailor interventions to these kind of neighborhoods," she adds.
More information
For more details on the dangers of underage drinking, go to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety or the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
