Even though 21 is the minimum legal drinking age all across the country, alcohol is readily available to youth. They get it from commercial sources, such as convenience stores and bars, as well as from social sources, such as friends and family. Communities use a variety of ways to try to restrict youth access to alcohol. This study is designed to measure the effectiveness a combination of five interventions recommended as best practices to reduce commercial and social access to alcohol among youth: (a) a reward and reminder program for retail clerks and merchants, (b) increased enforcement of sales laws through compliance checks, (c) increased enforcement of laws against adults providing alcohol to minors through a stranger purchase (shoulder tap) intervention, (d) increased enforcement of laws against underage drinking and providing alcohol to minors through a party dispersal (party patrol) program, and (e) strategic media advocacy to increase public awareness of the problems associated with underage drinking and to increase public support for the interventions. We will randomly assign 34 Oregon communities to either implement the strategies or serve as controls – not implementing new programs (17 per condition). The environmental prevention strategies will be implemented in a staggered fashion over the five-year study period. We will measure changes in youth alcohol purchase and use using surveys of students and “decoy” surveys of alcohol sales outlets to determine whether stores and bars continue to sell to underage purchasers. These surveys will take place in all 34 communities. Several waves of baseline data have already been collected from middle and high school students for the Oregon Healthy Teens Project. This study will help increase understanding of how environmental strategies affect underage drinking and will have important implications for the prevention of underage drinking and drinking problems.

 

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