The Drinking Problem

There was nothing particularly unusual about it, unfortunately: a couple of nice kids, driving home from a couple of good parties, went off the road. She was killed, he was not. Everybody felt terrible. Then last week--three months after the accident--some thing happened that made the sad, unnecessary death of Nancy Hitchings, 17, of Half Mile Road, Darien, Conn., a matter of national controversy. Circuit Court Judge Rodney S. Eielson, presiding over the trial of 18-year-old Michael Smith for reckless driving and negligent homicide, ordered the arrest of 14 adults for serving alcohol at the two parties that Michael and Nancy had attended.

Section 30-86 of the Connecticut Liquor Control Act was clear: Any person, except the parent, or guardian of a minor, who delivers or gives any such liquor to any such minor, except on the order of a practicing physician, shall be subject to the penalties--up to a year in jail and/ or up to $1,000 fine. Booked under this statute were a vice president of the Johns-Manville Corp., a psychiatrist, an Olin Mathieson Chemical Corp. executive, a consulting engineer, their wives and a public-school science teacher who was moonlighting as a bartender at one of the parties, as well as another bartender, two caterers and part-time waiters. Judge Eielson's regret seemed to be that he could not fill Fairfield County jails with parents. "The guilt of needless loss of life is in every living room in this community," he said. "I wish I had the power to get at every parent who is guilty."

All of Darien was stunned to realize that adults could be charged with a crime for serving liquor in their own homes. "A man's home is his castle, isn't it?" was the frequent plaint. Other parents in other areas might be equally surprised to learn that they were lawbreakers too. In many states, the law can be interpreted to forbid any person to serve liquor to an adolescent, whether in public or private. In other states, adults can be held culpable for such an amiable drawing-room practice on the grounds that they have contributed "to the delinquency of a minor."

Party Codes. But in practice, these laws are almost never enforced. "How can I go into somebody's home and find evidence to prove that somebody was serving drinks to a minor?" demanded a Los Angeles sheriff last week. But in supermarkets and commuter trains--and cocktail parties--most of the talk circled a more basic dilemma of a drinking society: Can people be kept away from alcohol until they are 21--and should they be, anyway?

The party is a major problem. In many communities, parents circulate "party codes" to try to keep children's entertaining on the Coke standard. But this works only if all the parents hold the line. And in the affluent suburbs of the Northeast, Middle West and West Coast (the South seems relatively exempt), most parents glumly concede that "the boys won't come if it's going to be dry." Or, worse yet, they'll bring their own liquor. For those who elect to bow to this pressure, the most widely used solution is to supply beer or wine-laced punch, have plenty of food, and close the bar at intervals. Things get more complicated with older brothers, or those dashing college seniors that every debutante hopes will condescend to come to her coming-out party. And the debutante's proud parents may also invite some of their grownup friends, who will feel entitled to somewhat stiffer refreshment. How does, the hired man behind the bar decide exactly who gets what?

Parents who would like to meet the situation by serving no alcohol to minors--their own or others--under any circumstances, are faced with the increasingly obvious fact that all over the U.S., teen-agers are getting it anyway. The forging of drivers' licenses and I.D. cards is a booming business; but a doctored license may be an unnecessary luxury when there are so many grocery clerks to whom all customers look 21, so many adults ready to buy a bottle or so for a young friend, and so many bootleggers operating out of the trunk compartment of a cruising car.

U.C.L.A.'s Dean Byron H. Atkinson feels that the present law is unenforceable among college students--and therefore bad. "Alcohol has a special appeal to young people," he says. "It makes them feel more mature and confident at a period in their lives when the most important thing is to feel more mature and more confident. And age is certainly one of the most inconclusive, inconsequential measures of maturity."

Learning to Cope. Is a 21-year-old whose lips have never touched liquor going to be better able to handle it than an 18-year-old who has been broken in to its use more or less gradually at a time in his life when parental influence is stronger? In Darien and points west, many argue that it is the parents' responsibility to prepare their children for the world as it is, that alcohol is part of that world, and that learning to cope with it is a part of one's education better performed in the home than in the roadhouse.

To this end, many parents begin with their 16-year-olds on mild drinks such as beer and Dubonnet, with a glass of wine for festive occasions. Even this may be breaking a strict interpretation of an unenforceable law in many states; to give a watered-down highball to your daughter's 20-year-old beau may land you in the cooler if he runs over someone on his way home.

With this chilling fact in mind, a group in Darien began to talk last week about fighting the case of the arrested adults all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary, to try to get Section 30-86 off the books. But law or no law, invasion of privacy or not, the problem remains: how old is an adult and what is a drink?

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