A recent incident of underage drinking highlights the troubles of what is still largely considered a rite of passage for high-schoolers and the efforts to end such traditions.
Students from 11 area high schools are now facing charges after Pierce County’s multi-agency Party Intervention Patrol arrested them last month at a Puyallup party that involved illegal drinking.
Police arrested 27 young adults as young as 15 for possessing alcohol. Nearly all of the teens are students at, or recent graduates of, Curtis, Wilson, Chief Leschi, Franklin Pierce, Bethel, Mt. Tahoma, Orting, Gig Harbor, Foss, and Spanaway Lake high schools, or Challenger Secondary School. One of the teens was arrested for an outstanding drunken driving charge and was taken to jail.
Police confiscated a set of brass knuckles from one of the youth and discovered that several of the students already had prior arrests for illegal possession of alcohol.
“It was not their first rodeo,” said Bonney Lake Police Sgt. Rob Hoag, who supervised the patrol.
The bust started when police arrived at the 7700 block of 181st Street East on Sept. 20, after an anonymous caller tipped them off to dozens of cars that were parked along the street. More than 50 teens were partying at a house along the street, prompting police to form a 10-person team to break up the revelry, which included many teens openly drinking alcohol in the front yard.
Police entered the house and found alcohol bottles littering the floor as well as a strong odor of marijuana.
The parents of the teen hosting the party were in Portland at the time, according to police accounts. The 16-year-old boy had requested the police to come into his home to bring order to the party, which had clearly gotten out of hand.
Dozens of the teens fled the house as police approached, even breaking down the back fence during a stampede into some nearby woods.
Not only was the house trashed, the host’s parents could face criminal and civil charges for leaving their son unsupervised.
“Parents who leave their underage kids and property unsupervised are asking for trouble,” said Chief John Cheesman, chief of the Fircrest Police Department and chair of the Tacoma Pierce County DUI and Traffic Safety Task Force, which sponsors the program.
Such parents, while they may not have expressly given permission for an illegal party to occur, have been shown in some courts to be negligent in cases involving deaths or serious injuries from car crashes, rapes, alcohol poisoning or the destruction of personal property.
“Being unaware and/or not at home is not a good defense for parents in this case,” Cheesman said.
While some parents are complacent about underage drinking, others are taking charge through their participation in the Party Intervention Patrol, an effort funded by the Washington Traffic Safety Commission and local police agencies.
After underage drinkers are arrested by a Party Intervention Patrol, chemical dependency professionals conduct brief screenings and interventions aimed at linking youth with community dependency resources. Trained volunteers also pass information to parents to help them take steps to prevent the youths from drinking again. The effort is working. Before the Party Intervention Patrols started seven years ago, an average of eight impaired teenagers died each year in vehicle crashes in Pierce County. Since 2007, Party Intervention Patrol officers have been credited with rescuing a teen suffering from alcohol poisoning who was left in a bath tub at a party, an impaired young driver found unconscious and slumped over the steering wheel in the middle of the road, and an underage girl found walking down railroad tracks after drinking with adults at a nearby bar.
Drinking Levels among YouthA Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that among high school students, during the past 30 days:
39 percent drank some amount of alcohol.
22 percent binge drank.
8 percent drove after drinking alcohol.
24 percent rode with a driver who had been drinking alcohol.
Although drinking alcohol by people under the age of 21 is illegal, teens consume 11 percent of all alcohol in the United States. More than 90 percent of this alcohol is consumed in the form of binge drinks. On average, underage drinkers consume more drinks per drinking occasion than adult drinkers. That results in an estimated 189,000 emergency rooms visits by teens for injuries and other conditions linked to alcohol.
Statistics courtesy of the Center for Disease Control