By Jessica Andrews-Wilson | Gwinnett United In Drug Education, Inc. (GUIDE) is a non-profit community-based substance abuse prevention agency that has been serving Gwinnett County since 1986. GUIDE is an expert resource in positive youth development and substance abuse prevention and works together with various community partners to improve community conditions for a safe and healthy Gwinnett.
Andrews-Wilson
In response to a significant increase in underage drinking in Gwinnett County in 2002, GUIDE began using the Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol model to reduce the number of youth in our community consuming alcohol under age.
This large-scale prevention effort has been possible because of the collaboration of multiple organizations in Gwinnett County, including GUIDE’s work with the Gwinnett Coalition for Health and Human Services. In 2007, GUIDE’s efforts to prevent underage drinking expanded when the Gwinnett Coalition received a Drug Free Communities grant that provided funding for compliance checks.
Compliance checks help ensure that alcohol retailers check IDs of every customer and do not sell to those under 21. In order to conduct these checks, police officers train underage decoys to go into restaurants, drug stores, convenience stores and grocery stores to attempt to buy alcohol. If they are sold or served alcohol, officers then go in and give citations to the employee. These checks “are an important community tool for reducing illegal alcohol sales to minors and to promote community normative change,” according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Since October 2008, Gwinnett County Police Department officers have conducted approximately two such checks a month in unincorporated Gwinnett County and within a few select cities. The payments for underage decoys continue to be funded by the Drug Free Communities grant through the Gwinnett Coalition. GUIDE later expanded this strategy and started to fund the compliance checks for the City of Lilburn Police Department in 2013 and the City of Snellville Police Department in 2014 after being selected as a Georgia Alcohol Prevention Project provider through the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities.
By tracking results of these police interventions and figuring out the compliance rates, GUIDE continues to measure the effectiveness of this strategy in reducing commercial access of alcohol to teens and underage young adults.
Between October 2014 and September 2015, police visited 372 stores in unincorporated Gwinnett County and the cities of Grayson, Lilburn and Snellville. Out of these stores, 323 did not sell to the underage decoy, for a compliance rate of 87 percent. This is an increase from 85 percent between October 2013 and September 2014.
Findings show that when compliance checks are done on a regular basis, alcohol retailers focus more on training their employees about the importance of checking IDs, and in turn, employees are less likely to sell alcohol to minors. Thanks to the efforts of local police departments, it is clear that compliance checks are making a difference in Gwinnett County!
We invite you to visit www.guideinc.org to stay connected with prevention efforts throughout the upcoming year.
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