A bill in the Michigan Legislature would require a customer to provide his name, address, telephone number and driver’s license number before buying a keg.
Liquor vendors also would have to tag kegs and keep copies so buyers could be held liable for minors caught drinking from their kegs.
The bill is stuck in committee, but University of Michigan students and liquor store owners already are fighting it. At Northwestern, everyone from Associated Student Government President Adam Humann to a University Police officer criticized the Michigan bill and said nothing like it would work here.
Tagging kegs would not be more effective than current safeguards in many stores, said Brian Traeger, a Speech junior. Currently in Evanston, customers sometimes can get refunds for returning a keg once it’s empty, but they must leave their names with store clerks at the time of purchase.
“When you throw your money down, it’s almost like a tagging system already,” Traeger said.
The goal of the bill is to curb underage and binge drinking. A Michigan student died in November after a 21st-birthday drinking binge.
Michigan liquor stores about three years ago voluntarily began tagging kegs. But the vendors gave up the experiment when keg sales plummeted, according to university newspaper reports.
Lt. Glenn Turner of UP said that even if vendors stuck to it, keg-tagging wouldn’t stop underage and binge drinking.
“I think it’s always going to be a problem,” Turner said. “Kids that go to college are going to drink.”
The Illinois Legislature has not considered a keg-tagging law, and ASG President Adam Humann said NU administrators are not likely to either, partly because drinking is not as prevalent at NU.
“We’re not 40,000 students in a small town,” said Humann, a Weinberg senior.
He also said there is not automatically a connection between buying a keg and promoting underage and binge drinking.
“An interesting way to look at it would be how (the bill) would prove every underaged person at a party is drinking,” he said.
And the owner of Evanston 1st Liquors said tagging kegs wouldn’t stop underage drinkers from getting to them.
“(The bill) is a good idea but I don’t think it’s going to work,” he said. “They’re going to send other people with the proper ID.”
Arjun Sarkar, a Weinberg senior, said students would find ways around a keg-tagging law.
“In colleges and high schools, I think underaged people would switch to getting mass amounts of packaged beer, like cans,” Sarkar said.
In college, people could easily find a 21-year-old to buy for them, he said.
“Usually, a person buying a keg seems to be of age,” he said. “The problem will be how to determine who is coming in to purchase for people of age or for people under 21.”
