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A few years back, during my daily walks on the Wildwood Boardwalk, I noticed a lot of teenagers were carrying juice and soda bottles and taking long swigs, which certainly isn’t unusual.
What was unusual was many of them had the drunken staggers, and it didn’t take me long to put together that their bottles were laced with booze. It didn’t take the cops long to arrive at the same conclusion, and they began stopping the drunken teens, confiscating their bottles, and escorting the kids off to the hoosegow. These young people weren’t as slick as they thought.
Alcohol use and binge drinking are epidemic among young people today, and when they’re on their own at the Shore, the incidence naturally escalates. The Shore and booze are as natural as sun and bikinis, and I’m sure most people reading this can remember their own alcoholic adventures by the beautiful sea. I sure can.
But past generations at least tried to show some restraint. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, today’s kids just let it all hang out all the time. I remember seeing one young man staggering down the Boardwalk, so drunk he literally veered from one side to the other, like a seaman on a ship during a storm. Only there are no safety ropes on the Boardwalk, and I still marvel that this polluted young dude stayed upright. And this was at 10 a.m.
Recently, the Wildwood police arrested 29 people at the Eden Roc Motel for consuming alcohol illegally. The owner was charged with providing real property to minors to consume alcohol. The very next night, the cops were there again, and observed underage persons under the influence of alcohol, according to a police department release. Eight minors were issued summons for allegedly being under the influence of or possessing alcoholic beverages and six juveniles were brought to the station and processed for alleged underage possession and consumption of alcohol, then released to guardians. More than 40 cases of beer and "numerous other types of alcohol" were seized at the motel.
But gone are the days when these kids will skate with a slap on the wrist. Today, punishment for underage drinking in New Jersey includes loss of driver’s license, a $1,250 fine or mandatory jail time, mandatory participation in alcohol education or treatment programs, a criminal record, and mandatory reporting of conviction on all legal documents, including student loan applications. Getting pinched for underage drinking can now have lifelong repercussions.
Jack Keenan, originally a South Philly guy, who now operates Keenan’s Irish Pub in North Wildwood, recently wrote a guest column in the Press of Atlantic City headlined "Teens beware: Bars cracking down on drinking." And he knows from a tavern owner’s standpoint about teenage drinking. Two days before last Irish Weekend he was shut down for six months by the State of New Jersey for serving two minors. Keenan’s is the epicenter of Irish Weekend and it’s estimated he lost at least $250,000 over that weekend and a lot more over the next six months.
In his column, Keenan said, "Recently, the North Wildwood Tavern Owners Association, the New Jersey Tavern Owners Association and the city of North Wildwood joined forces to send a strong, zero-tolerance message to underage drinkers."
Keenan went on about New Jersey’s new "Check Yourself" public awareness campaign to alert minors about "attempting to gain access to our bars with fake or fraudulent identification."
He said that underage drinking is "a longstanding problem that has been made even more difficult as a result of the easy access to technologically sophisticated fake or fraudulent IDs that make detection challenging, if not impossible."
He warned not only underage drinkers, "but their parents and siblings who aid and abet their crime, that we will go after them to the fullest extent provided by law. We want to put an end to this dangerous and unwanted New Jersey shore tradition."
Keenan and everybody else at the Shore have had enough of loud, brazen, drunken, stupid kids roaming the streets and risking the livelihoods of thousands of people by trying to get served illegally.
Like Howard Beale in "Network," they’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take this anymore.
Got that?
