The National Liquor Law Enforcement Association (NLLEA) is a non-profit association
of law enforcement personnel dedicated to the enforcement of liquor laws and regulations.
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To renew your NLLEA Agency Membership for 2022-23 go to www.nllea.org and log in with your email and password. Click on my agency, (right below your name) that will take you to your agency page, then click on renew membership, it is a purple button in left corner, then enter your credit card information and hit submit. If you have any problems at all just call Carrie Christofes, Executive Director at 724-762-5939 and she will take your payment over the phone. | |
Conference Registration and Hotel Booking are Now Available
Registration is $500.00 for members and $650.00 for non-members
Hotel Accomodations for NLLEA Guests is $149.00/night
NLLEA Conference is a professional law enforcement event, open to NLLEA members, qualified non-members, public health professionals and exhibitors
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A letter to the American public: How to reduce underage drinking in America
Parents, schools and law enforcement must work together to prevent young lives from being needlessly taken
Police1
By Bradley D. Beach
Bradley D. Beach is a supervising agent in Charge for the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, serving a large portion of Los Angeles County and has been employed there since 1999. As a sworn peace officer, Beach is a background investigator, field training officer, internal affairs investigator, acting public information officer and long-time firearms instructor. He was also elected in 2020 and is a Governing Board Member, Trustee Area #4, for the ABC Unified School District which oversees 30 schools and 2,000 employees.
On a hazy, cool morning while driving to school, a 17-year-old girl named Jane ran a stop sign and pulled out in front of a bus. Her SUV was immediately crushed on the driver’s side, and she died instantly. The door had to be pried open by emergency personnel to remove her lifeless body.
A rookie California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) agent was assigned to search the girl’s SUV. All that remained inside was blood on the seat, an empty alcohol bottle, a sales receipt from a liquor store, a fraudulent ID, and her left brown knee-high boot wedged between the wheel well and floorboard.
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Ohio Division of Liquor Control: Don’t participate in secondary liquor sales
The Ohio Division of Liquor Control and the Ohio Investigative Unit strongly reminds Ohio consumers to not sell or buy liquor on the secondary market.
Secondary liquor sales often occur on the internet including on social media websites such as Facebook and other sites such as Craigslist. Typically, sellers will purchase bottles of liquor and turn around to resell them.
Secondary sales cases can result in fines and/or jail time. In 2021, OIU received 34 referrals resulting in 32 warnings and two arrests compared with 50 referrals, zero arrests and 47 warnings in 2020, and 24 referrals, 11 arrests and four warnings in 2019. More than 70 percent of cases were referred to OIU’s Cincinnati district.
“The controls in place are there to ensure the contents inside the liquor bottles are safe,” said OIU Commander Erik Lockhart. “When alcohol is purchased from authorized sources, buyers can ensure the contents inside are genuine and safe.”
In Ohio, consumers may only purchase spirituous liquor from authorized sources such as an OHLQ location, which are private businesses that sell the product on behalf of the state of Ohio, or permitted retail establishments, such as bars and restaurants.
“We appreciate the efforts OIU takes to keep the market fair and consumers safe,” Division Superintendent Jim Canepa said. “Ohio consumers who purchase their liquor the right way support small businesses that sell these products legally and avoid buying counterfeit or tampered with products.”
OIU and the Division will continue to investigate secondary market liquor sales. If you know of anyone selling alcohol illegally, contact your local OIU District Office.
The Ohio Investigative Unit is charged with enforcing the state’s liquor laws and is the only state law enforcement agency specifically tasked with investigating food stamp fraud crimes. Agents also investigate tobacco violations.
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Will Delivery Services Let Your Kids Order Alcohol?
How to keep underaged, aspiring booze-hounds from having hooch delivered.
Online food delivery service DoorDash just made it more difficult for underaged people to have alcohol delivered. The company announced a new two-step ID verification process for alcohol delivery they claim sets a “new industry standard for responsible alcohol delivery.” How does the rest of the food/drink delivery industry stack up? Which services offer the best protection for parents who want to keep their kids from getting illicit booze deliveries?
Everyone checks ID, but some companies leave it up to the driver
All major delivery services for both restaurant meals and groceries that I am aware of require drivers to check IDs upon delivery of alcohol. Most also require drivers to take a picture of the ID, which is checked electronically for authenticity.
The drivers, then, are the weak link in the underage alcohol delivery chain. If IDs aren’t being verified electronically, drivers are essentially being asked to determine whether they’re real or fake, whether they belong to the person presenting them, and whether customers are too drunk to have alcohol delivered to them. None of this necessarily easy to do, but drivers and restaurants may nevertheless be liable for screwing it up.
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28 people dead, 60 sick in India from drinking spiked liquor
AHMEDABAD, India (AP) — At least 28 people have died and 60 others became ill from drinking altered liquor in western India, officials said Tuesday.
Senior government official Mukesh Parmar said the deaths occurred in Ahmedabad and Botad districts of Gujarat state, where manufacturing, sale and consumption of liquor are prohibited. It was not immediately known what chemical was used to alter the liquor.
Ashish Gupta, Gujarat state’s police chief, said several suspected bootleggers who were involved in selling the spiked alcohol have been detained.
Deaths from illegally brewed alcohol are common in India, where illicit liquor is cheap and often spiked with chemicals such as pesticides to increase potency.
Illicit liquor has also become a hugely profitable industry across India where bootleggers pay no taxes and sell enormous quantities of their product to the poor at a cheap rate.
In 2020, at least 120 people died after drinking tainted liquor in India’s northern Punjab state.
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18-year-olds can now serve alcohol at restaurants in Kentucky
House Bill 252 lowers the age someone must be to serve alcohol from 20 to 18.
For restaurants like Mark’s Feed Store, a place that has felt the impact of staffing shortages, this new law comes as good news.
“It’s a whole new pool of people that we’ve never had before,” said Mark’s Feed Store Director of Operations Mary Stebbins.
Stebbins, who’s worked at the restaurant for the last 18 years, explained that much of their serving staff left during the pandemic. They still haven’t fully bounced back from the departures.
“The servers that we currently had, had to get out of the business because they had to make money and the unemployment was not enough to sustain them,” Stebbins said.
HB 252 opens the door to a new group of potential hires who previously wouldn’t have been able to bring a beer to your table.
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Could Massachusetts Bring Back Happy Hour?
Legislators are making another attempt to bring back drink specials nearly 40 years after they were banned
The state Senate has passed a bill that would give Massachusetts cities and towns the right to decide whether to allow happy hour drink promotions at restaurants and bars. It still has several hurdles to get through — support from the House and from Gov. Charlie Baker — and isn’t the first attempt to overturn the nearly 40-year-old ban. But if it succeeds, Boston and other municipalities could make their own decisions about whether to allow two-for-one drinks and other similar specials during certain hours.
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Slow Your Roll — Once-Promising Alcohol Shipping Model Leaves Beer Out To Dry
A model direct-to-consumer (DTC) alcohol shipping law that was originally designed to expand shipping permissions for beer has, years later, left beer in the dust. It’s another setback for DTC beer shipping which, despite its popularity among consumers and its pandemic-era boost, has struggled to make legal gains.
On July 13, an influential legislative advisory board known as the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) approved the Uniform Alcohol Direct-Shipping Compliance Act, essentially a template that individual state legislatures can use to draft their own DTC alcohol bills. The ULC itself does not have the power to ratify laws, but it was founded in 1892 to promote uniformity among states’ laws. Its drafts are widely influential: its Uniform Commercial Code, for example, was adopted by all 50 states and governs every commercial transaction in the U.S.
When the ULC first got to work on the alcohol shipping bill in 2019, its goal was specifically to create a standardized set of regulations to expand DTC shipping of beer and spirits, which don’t enjoy the same privileges as wine. Currently, 45 states allow DTC shipping of wine, but just 12 allow DTC shipping of beer and seven allow shipments of spirits. (Non-alcoholic beer can be shipped DTC nationally, as these products are not considered alcohol under the federal definition.)
Yet the draft bill that the ULC approved on July 13 doesn’t address beer (or spirits) specifically. Instead, it focuses on correcting perceived problems with DTC wine shipments in ways that have the potential to stifle DTC shipping permissions for alcohol across the board.
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DoorDash adds 2-step ID verification for alcohol delivery
With the expansion of to-go alcohol across multiple states, alcohol enforcement agencies have noted an erosion of compliance with liquor ID laws stemming from alcohol delivery. Virginia agents last year, for example, conducted at least 52 decoy operations in which they ordered alcohol to be delivered to underage buyers. During that exercise, 32 underage buyers ended up with alcohol.
The new process builds on DoorDash’s existing safety features, which includes ID verification, offering customers the option to opt out from alcohol delivery and providing alcohol safety resources to its drivers, according to the press release.
“With today’s announcement of two-step or dual ID verification, we’re setting a new industry standard for responsible alcohol delivery,” Erik Ragotte, DoorDash’s general manager of alcohol, said in the press release. “The new safety measures will help ensure alcohol is delivered to people over the age of 21. We will continue to innovate and find even more ways to promote responsible alcohol delivery.”
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Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board Awards Record $3.4 Million In Grants To Reduce Underage And Dangerous Drinking
Harrisburg – Committed to providing financial support to reduce underage and dangerous alcohol consumption, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) today announced it will award almost $3.4 million to 97 schools, community organizations, municipalities, law enforcement organizations, nonprofit organizations, for-profit organizations, and institutions of higher education through the 2022-24 Alcohol Education Grant Program.
"Funding projects that support alcohol education and promote public health and safety is a vital part of our mission," said PLCB Chairman Tim Holden. "Since 1999, the PLCB has awarded $21.1 million in alcohol education grants to prevent underage and irresponsible drinking.”
This year, of 110 grant applications received, 97 organizations from 41 counties across Pennsylvania were awarded a total of $3,364,989 in grants. The maximum award for each two-year grant is $40,000.
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