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In N.H., a Beer in the Belly Can Get Youths Arrested

Durham detective Michael Bilodeau checks identity cards at a student party after neighbors complained of noise in the apartment building. Bilodeau told the apartment residents to send everyone home. No one was arrested.
Durham detective Michael Bilodeau checks identity cards at a student party after neighbors complained of noise in the apartment building. Bilodeau told the apartment residents to send everyone home. No one was arrested. (Photos By Geoff Forester For The Washington Post)
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"It's just like looking for someone who's a drunk driver," said Sgt. Kevin Kincaid of the Manchester police. The clues might be a stumbling walk, glassy eyes, an odor of alcohol or a blood alcohol concentration of .02, police say.

Now, according to the judge who oversees New Hampshire's district courts, about half of the state's 6,000 cases of underage-possession in a typical year involve intoxication, not possession in the traditional sense.

But as common as it has become, the law has not lost its capacity to surprise.

"I really had no idea you could get arrested for that," said Chris Cormio, 20, a Massachusetts native now attending Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. Last February, he drank two beers, then set out on foot for a police station to bail out a friend. Cormio said he had brushed his teeth to get rid of the alcohol smell, but an officer noticed something amiss.

"Where I'm from," Cormio said, "they take you home when that happens to you."

So far, such laws remain relatively uncommon.

But that's starting to change: In Virginia, a 2003 bill allowed minors to be prosecuted for showing "physical indicia of consumption of alcohol," whether or not a container of booze is present. Alcohol laws with similar intent have also been enacted in Vermont, Arizona, Utah and Missouri, where legislators approved a new "possession by consumption" statute last summer.

South Dakota has applied the same logic to drug use, targeting controlled substances that are already "absorbed into the human body."

Here in New Hampshire, some legislators are trying to make the law stricter. If their bill passes, police would no longer have to determine whether a young person has drunk enough to be intoxicated -- any alcohol consumption at all would be enough for a charge.

Defense attorneys and some legal experts have objected to this kind of thinking, questioning how anyone could be convicted of "possessing" something that an officer cannot see.

They say laws such as New Hampshire's, which target intoxication, are problematic because an act must be voluntary to be illegal.

That's certainly the case with getting drunk -- drinkers choose to hoist a beer to their lips.


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