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.”