“Iowans to Reduce Underage Drinking, a group of young people and adults from across the state, is lobbying Iowa’s senators and representatives to pass a statewide beer keg law in this session of the Legislature.” So read the opening lines of the January 29th, 2007 press release announcing the final time that Iowa students would lobby for keg registration before statewide legislation was passed to adopt this measure and cut down on underage drinking in the state.
“It was a long process- we were working on the project for four or five years,” says Carol Brown, project assistant for the Mason City Youth Task Force in Mason City. The project had originally started out with a very small group that wanted to draw attention to the importance of keg registration. Keg registration, something required by Missouri and Indiana as well as numerous other states, requires that liquor stores selling beer kegs keep track of individuals who purchase the kegs by doing such things as taking down their license plate number or the number off a state-issued ID. This helps to hold people accountable for their actions.
Students discuss keg registration on a radio talk show
“If there’s a kegger going on somewhere and kids see law enforcement coming, they can just scatter and no one will know who was involved.
If the keg is registered, you can sort of track who bought the keg and figure things out that way. It’s about access and keeping adults accountable for safe purchase.” Iowans decided to do something about the situation. With young people from various towns and counties across the state as the main force behind this effort, Iowa finally managed to pass the keg registration bill in March of 2007.
Carol Brown, Youth Coordinator at Mason City Youth Task Force, can be reached by phone at (641) 421-2708 and by email at cbrown@masoncity.net.
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