Boston Is Taking Extreme Measures to Combat Underage Drinking
When Gavin Holt was called before a Boston municipal court in October over a party that some of his housemates had thrown, he thought the incident would be a mere blip in the first semester of his junior year.
The Boston College biology student said he wasn’t even present at the party that resulted in noise complaints and disorderly house charges against him and a dozen others. Nonetheless, three months and thousands of dollars in legal fees later, Holt acknowledged the event for what it turned into: “An extra weight on my shoulders that I was carrying throughout the semester.”
Holt received a sentence of 20 hours of community service and was required to write letters of apology to the school and neighborhood.
In this buttoned-up northeastern city with some 160,000 college students and notoriously strict laws when it comes to alcohol, imbibing underage has long been a point of friction. But lately those tensions have been brought to a boil as a result of a postpandemic partying revival, increasingly sophisticated fake IDs and stricter enforcement. According to the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission, a state agency that supervises businesses that serve alcohol, the number of fake IDs confiscated in the state last year hit its highest level in at least two decades.
