Word: hosted
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...spread of social-host laws makes it harder to teach a European model here. True, it's unlikely that police are going to raid private homes when only parents and their kids are together. But social-host prosecutions can be quite aggressive; in 2002 a Virginia mom and stepfather were sentenced to eight years behind bars for serving their son and his friends for the boy's 16th birthday. The couple had collected car keys in advance, and no one was hurt. But after years of failed appeals, the mom and stepdad, now divorced, had to report to jail last...
Most social-host laws give police expansive powers. According to data compiled by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, an organization based in Calverton, Md., that studies alcohol policy, only eight of 67 U.S. jurisdictions with social-host laws require that the homeowner have "actual knowledge" of underage drinking at the house to be charged with a crime. In other words, you can violate most social-host laws even if you are in another country when your kid decides to party. And under many social-host laws, a meal with wine served at a dinner table is treated...
...surprising that social-host laws don't seem to work as intended. In 2003, San Diego became one of the first big jurisdictions to adopt a social-host ordinance (both the city and county of San Diego passed a social-host law that year). After some legal wrangling, a tougher version of the city's law was enacted in 2006. Yet according to the San Diego Police Department, patrol-car responses to parties in the city increased from 7,265 in 2002 to 9,383 last year. (This figure includes parties with both underage and of-age drinkers, since...
...period since the city's social-host law was first enacted has also seen an enormous increase in the number of kids going to hospitals with alcohol-related problems. According to data from San Diego County's health department, the number of minors presenting alcohol and substance-abuse problems at health-care facilities in the jurisdiction rose from 473 in 2002 to 892 last year. At one of the city's biggest hospitals, Sharp Memorial, 7.3% of underage trauma admissions involved alcohol in 2002; by 2005 the figure...
...other words, the social-host law appears to have broken up big house parties into many smaller ones. Possibly because fewer adults are present, the parties are less supervised, and more kids are getting so drunk they...