Celebs Put Their Best Foot Forward

Ankle Bracelets Are a Sobering Accessory

Whenever Lindsay Lohan so much as sweats, it is required that some journalist, somewhere, write a story about it. So here is that story.

After all, you can learn a lot about people from their sweat. If they've been exercising or eating cloves of garlic. Or in Lindsay's case, if she's been drinking too much alcohol, as she has been known to do on occasion.

It's the sweat that's often the alcohol-swilling giveaway, that pungent aroma, not unlike that of a foot or an old sack of potatoes, of "beerodorant," the 80-proof perfume that seeps out of every pore in the body, that stains undershirts, that toxifies socks. From head to, well, ankle.

And if humans can pick up the odor, then it's not so surprising that engineering geniuses have created a machine that can smell it and report via modem if a person has been drinking, and it's not so surprising that the machine has ended up strapped to Lindsay Lohan's ankle.

Her publicist told People magazine that Lohan, who celebrated an alcohol-free 21st birthday earlier this month, decided "on her own" to wear the bracelet to demonstrate her commitment to sobriety, after an arrest in May for driving under the influence and a 45-day stint at Malibu treatment center Promises.

What is this boozer-busting creation, you ask? The Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor, or SCRAM, a sweat-sensing, electronically monitored anklet, has rocketed in popularity. Since its launch in 2003, the ankle bracelets have helped keep 40,000 drinkers on the wagon, according to their manufacturer, frequently as a condition of parole or probation for alcohol offenders. Even some famous ones. Like Lohan.

"We can't comment on or confirm any particular client. But if you have confirmation that someone is on an alcohol-monitoring bracelet, it would be ours," said Kathleen Brown, a spokeswoman for Alcohol Monitoring Systems, the Colorado-based company that manufactures the anklets.

The black, clunky ankle bracelet's rise to fame is the sort craved by upstart clothing designers: Former "Lost" star Michelle Rodriguez sported one at New York's Fashion Week in February; rapper-actress Eve started wearing one at the end of June; Tracy Morgan of "30 Rock" wore one in early June while hosting the Guy's Choice Awards for Spike TV. The ankle bracelet has reached the apex of tabloid-celebrity fashion since Lohan -- whose face watches ubiquitously over so many grocery store checkout lanes that future anthropologists will speculate that her freckled visage was a protective icon to remove ill spirits from our food -- wore one Saturday while clubbing with her friends at Pure in Las Vegas.

The anklet (or, as a blog at tech publication Cnet.com proposed, The Dranklet-- "Hey, girl, wanna get your drank on?" "Sorry, I got my dranklet on") is typically court-ordered, just like its more familiar cousin, the house arrest bracelet. The SCRAM ankle bracelets, which cannot be removed by the wearer, reads the ethanol content of ankle sweat every hour. Once a day, the anklet wearer must be near the SCRAM modem, which reports the data to SCRAMNet, where law enforcement can easily see if court-ordered teetotalers are behaving.

At least one of those SCRAM-sporters is less than enthused about the device. Rodriguez, who was assigned an ankle bracelet after drunk-driving incidents in California and Hawaii, posted this on her Web site :"I go to get this thing put on and I realize this thing is like a freaking VCR, and why do they care If I drink, what am I gonna do, drink and walk over someone, I have no license. . . . One things for sure I'll take FBI approved truth serum over a VCR Dog Tag any day of the week." She also wrote "1984" and "Orwell" across the ankle bracelet, which certainly set her apart from the crowd at the Marc Jacobs show.

The price tag is certainly cheaper than your average Jacobs frock. Most of the 43 states that have SCRAM programs require the offender to pay a $50-to-$100 installation fee and a $10-to-$12 daily monitoring fee. Virginia and the District have not adopted the ankle bracelets, but according to Brown, more than 100 of them are in use across Maryland with programs in Anne Arundel, Frederick, Prince George's and St. Mary's counties.

"From our side of things, alcohol has always been the difficult one to test for because it leaves the system so quickly," says Pete Cucinotta, the St. Mary's County Juvenile Drug Court Program coordinator. The court started using the ankle bracelets earlier this year. "Other drugs you can do urine tests where you can pick up drugs for several hours or several days after use. But with alcohol, 60 minutes later, it's out of their system."

Cucinotta says the ankle bracelets have been effective at monitoring and curbing drinking among juveniles in his program. "A couple of them have said, 'That's really what kept me from drinking.' "

While some of those ordered to wear the anklets may not welcome the forced fashion statement whenever they wear skirts or shorts, their proponents point to the annual deaths caused by excessive alcohol use: 75,000 in 2001, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

In some circles, it's not a coup to have Lindsay Lohan traipsing around town in your product.

"Everybody says that there is no bad PR. But the thing that makes us uncomfortable with that publicity is we want people to know that this is really serious stuff," said spokeswoman Brown. "SCRAM is a really difficult thing to be on if you have a drinking problem. These are serious issues: DUI, domestic violence. We hope the high-profile stuff doesn't trivialize that."