Residents who thought they saw someone stumbling around drunk in Montgomery County over the last few days may have actually seen an actor pretending to be drunk. In an effort to curb alcohol service to intoxicated individuals, 40 Montgomery County restaurants were visited Thursday, Friday and Saturday by actors who tried to order alcoholic beverages while behaving as though intoxicated. The Responsible Retailing Forum — the national nonprofit behind the research project — will share its findings with area liquor license-holders and county officials on Oct. 4.
The project comes just a couple months after the end of fiscal 2011, when 31 percent of the restaurants checked in the county were found to have served alcohol to someone who was already intoxicated, a compliance rate that Responsible Retailing Forum President Brad Krevor called “alarming.”
However, that rate is a significant improvement from the previous year, when 52 percent of restaurants served alcohol to intoxicated customers.
Meanwhile, about 20 percent of the county restaurants checked in each of the last two fiscal years sold alcohol to underage customers. Even though the compliance rate is slightly better than for the number of drunks being served, serving underage customers can be worse and should be taken even more seriously, Krevor said.
Though a “100 percent ID-checking rate is virtually impossible,” he said, “the closer to 95 percent, the better.”
But Kathie Durbin, chief of the county Department of Liquor Control’s Division of Licensure, Regulation and Education, said the county’s liquor law compliance rates were good because the restaurant business sees a high amount of employee turnover.
Until now, Montgomery County has not performed routine checks to see if restaurants were serving customers who were already drunk, Durbin said. Rather, the county acted on complaints officials received.
Durbin said the number of complaints has been increasing over the last several years.
Krevor explained that local officials haven’t developed methods for preventing sales to the intoxicated as strong as they have for preventing sales to those who are underage because little research has been done on the first. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” he said.
In the long term, Krevor said he hopes the research project — which will be repeated in Portland, Ore., next month — leads to new protocols and techniques for jurisdictions, especially for places like college towns where the rates at which intoxicated customers are served “can be really scary.”
