Booze Busters - WALB.com, Albany News, Weather, Sports

November 11, 2002

Albany- As long as there are teenagers, there will be teenagers who want to drink alcohol. It's impossible to stop the demand, so law enforcement officers go after the suppliers.

Sixty-one clerks in Albany have been busted just this year for illegal alcohol sales. But amazingly, some still aren't getting the message, as we found out when we went undercover with the Booze Busters.

Operation Alcohol Buy is underway. Drug agents go undercover to catch store clerks making underage alcohol sales. Agents using sophisicated surveillance equipment watch and listen as clerks sell beer to two underaged undercover officers. And store after store sold to them.

Fifty-one stores were checked, 23 of them sold to the underage officers. The repeat offenders may end up in jail for up to a year. The clerks who sold for the first time will be fined between $200 and $1,000.

And the stores' alcohol licenses will be either suspended or revoked, depending on how many times clerks at the store have broken the law. Drug agents have just gotten a $70,000 grant to help stop underage alcohol sales.

And while they've focused on the sellers, you can look for them to go after underage buyers in the near future. Underage drinking was involved in 772 car wrecks in Georgia in 1998. 338 people were hurt in those wrecks, 23 were killed.

And here's a sobering thought: Someone is killed in an alcohol-related car wreck in America every 32 minutes.

• Stores which sold alcohol to underage buyers: 

posted at 3:45PM by dave.miller@walb.com