Sleuths target online booze

UNC to see if teens can buy

UNC-Chapel Hill cyber-detectives are heading out on a new quest to track down underage sin.

Students between 18 and 20 -- under academic and legal supervision -- will be recruited for a $400,000 study later this year to test how easy it is to order alcohol from the Web. The same researchers running the alcohol study helped put a major dent in online cigarette sales to minors with similar tests earlier this decade.

The number of underage people who buy booze over the Internet is a matter of controversy. But at some sites, a mouse click asserting that a buyer is 21 appears to be the only proof a minor needs to buy liquor, wine or beer. Offshore locations, variations in law from state to state, and the chance to avoid sales tax have all contributed to the growth of online alcohol-marketing sites.

"They don't do enough to keep underage people from buying," said Laura Borders, 18, a N.C. School of Science and Mathematics senior who's doing a preliminary survey of sites for the project.

UNC-Chapel Hill researchers Rebecca Williams and Kurt Ribisl have secured the $400,000, three-year grant from the nonprofit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to attempt underage purchases from as many as 100 Internet alcohol sellers.

In the study, UNC students will be given immunity by prosecutors, then order alcohol from Web sites to see how well the sites determine buyers' ages.

Even if relatively few minors are ordering beer, wine or liquor online, the practice should be shut down before it grows, said Traci L. Toomey, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. As crackdowns on selling beer and booze to minors in convenience stores and other bricks-and-mortar venues continue, online sources may get more underage traffic, Toomey said.

"I don't think we should ignore any possible sources of alcohol," said Toomey, who has researched underage drinking. "If we shut down one source, underage youth most likely will shift to another source."

New laws and other curbs could result from the UNC study, as they did after UNC researchers' groundbreaking surveys of Internet cigarette vendors.

"Most people that you talk to about it are shocked when you say you can buy alcohol online," said Williams, a project director at the UNC-CH Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.

"From what we've seen with cigarette sites, the controls are definitely not very strong."

Shutting down tobacco

The work of Williams and Ribisl helped federal and state regulators get credit-card companies and PayPal to agree not to process payments for Web-based tobacco sales. The UNC-CH researchers also helped out as UPS and other carriers agreed to ban shipping tobacco, in 2005.

"Our research made a big difference in forming these laws and voluntary agreements," Williams said.

Craig Lloyd, state executive director of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said the organization has encountered cases of online alcohol marketing to minors and referred them to the state Alcohol Law Enforcement division, or ALE.

"Someone had received something in the mail soliciting sales with a free bottle of wine," Lloyd said. "It had actually come to someone's young child."

Lloyd said MADD has been watching the issue and waiting for academic and scientific data to be released.

"We applaud [UNC researchers] for doing things like this to keep our roadways and children safe," he said.

Hard numbers elusive

Lawmakers and others have long worried about the ease with which underage drinkers can buy online.