Dad Defends Teen Drinking Party

Consider a stunning statistic: Between 10 and 20 percent of all the alcohol consumed in this country is drunk by kids who are underage.

It's an epidemic that leaves parents facing agonizing choices -- parents like Bill and Pat Anderson in West Warwick, R.I. When their son, Gregg, asked to throw an after-prom party with alcohol at their home, their first response was, "No way."

But then, Gregg told them the party would be at a local beach instead -- and that got them thinking. At the beach, there would be no supervision, and everyone would have to drive home. At their house, they could lay down some rules.

Gregg Anderson was 18 years old at the time, the youngest of the Andersons' three sons. The Andersons say they'd seen too many kids in their town lost to drunk driving, so they decided that a party with rules was the safer way to go.

"The rules were anybody that walked in the door, it didn't matter if they drove or not, they were not leaving," Gregg Anderson tells . "If you weren't gonna stay, you weren't gonna come at all."

Bill Anderson says he sat at the front door: "I took a recliner, put it down at the front door, grabbed a good novel. I let them know as soon as they came in the door, the keys came over. So, if you needed to get anything out of your car, get it done before you came into the house -- because once you come in the door, you don't leave."

He says he and his wife weren't going to let Gregg's friends drive, but they would them drink, as long as they got the alcohol themselves. That afternoon, Gregg and his friends carried a keg and a half out to their back deck.

What did Pat Anderson think about her son drinking? "If I could say to him, 'No, you cannot drink,' and know he wouldn't, that would be a wonderful situation," she says. "And it would be the answer to everything. But that's just not realistic. These kids do drink."

"Just saying no, just doesn't work," adds Bill Anderson.

"What if you had said, 'OK, I'll have the party, but no alcohol?'" asks Stahl.

"They wouldn't have come," says Bill Anderson.

"We wouldn't have had the party there," adds Gregg Anderson. "I was not gonna not drink after my senior prom. It just wasn't gonna happen."

And Gregg's friends who were at the party agree. "Absolutely," says Kyle O'Connor.

Approximately 50 kids arrived that night around midnight. Bill Anderson was standing guard at the door at 3 a.m., when the police showed up on a noise complaint. The officers took names and addresses, and drove away with the kegs.

The Andersons thought that was the end of it, until a week later, when Bill Anderson was arrested. The story was big news on local TV, and the front page of the paper. Supporters started a Bill Anderson defense fund, but the charges against him were dropped, because what he did wasn't against the law, since he didn't purchase the kegs himself. It's illegal in all 50 states for adults to provide alcohol to minors. But in most states, including Rhode Island, there is no law against simply allowing underage kids to drink.

That's the way it was in Kansas three years ago, when a 17-year-old named Paul Riggs got drunk at a party in a friend's basement with the parents upstairs. On the way home, Riggs crashed his truck into a tree and died three weeks later.

"What the parents did was -- they just went up into their room, closed the door, watched TV or whatever. And didn't bother to do anything -- check on those kids, or monitor that party," says District Attorney Paul Morrison, who investigated the case.

The parents dispute his account. They told 60 Minutes that they didn't ignore the kids, and saw no evidence of alcohol. But just a few weeks earlier, the police had found alcohol at their house when they broke up another teen party, and warned the parents that if they didn't stop kids from drinking in their home, someone was going to get hurt.

That made it all the more galling to Paul's mother, Debbie Riggs, when Morrison told her that the parents would go unpunished.

"I said, 'There's got to be a law. There's got to be child endangerment, or there's gotta be, you know, contributing to the delinquency of a minor. There has to be something to hold these people responsible,'" says Riggs. "And he said, 'No. I mean, unless you wanna go out there, and you wanna change the law, there's nothing.'"

So Riggs decided she would try to change the law and set out to learn about the issue.

"What goes on in the parties is a lot of binge drinking," says Jim Mosher, a lawyer and researcher who has studied underage drinking for the federal government. He says kids who binge account for more than 90 percent of all the alcohol teens drink. "It's almost all binge drinking. It's not having a glass of wine with your parents at the dinner table. This is heavy drinking, and the parties are where it most often happens."

"These people who say, 'Well, we take their keys, and we make sure that they don't leave,' that to me is just a fallacy," says Riggs. "Because is my child going to get violent? Is my child going to overindulge? Did I give you permission to take those risks with my child?"

"What about the argument that, one, they're gonna drink anyway -- better that they drink indoors, in someone's home, than out there on a beach or somewhere," says Stahl. "And better that a parent is around in case something does happen."

"I'm sorry," says Riggs. "I still think that when a parent condones alcohol drinking in the home, they're sending a message to these kids that it's OK."

"It's not just drunk driving. That's one of the myths, that if we just protect our kids from drunk driving that they'll be safe," says Mosher. "But sexual assault, violence ... We are not doing our children a favor by providing them a 'safe place' to drink."

Gregg Anderson says he and his friends were drunk the night the party was held. But Bill Anderson, who was at the front door, says he was unaware of the heavy drinking out back. But police came after Gregg says he and his friends made a lot of noise while doing a "keg stand."

"Somebody grabs the two handles on the keg. Two other people grab your feet, and lift you up, so, you're vertically straight up in the air. And then you just take the tap, and just put it in your mouth," says Gregg Anderson, describing what happened out back the night of the party. "That was when it got loud. That's why the cops came. What you do is, you count like, really how long you go for. And you know, it's all about competition to see who goes for the longest."

Bill Anderson says this did indeed happen at home.

"When parents say, 'How bad could it be? The parents are gonna be in the house,'" says Stahl. "And then you hear that they were binge drinking."

"If they were at our house, and they went into convulsions or some sort of medical emergency, we have a phone, and we can react to it," says Bill Anderson. "I can't sit here and say that everything we did was perfect. My mission for this party was to make sure kids didn't drink and drive." That argument, however, won't hold up in Kansas anymore. Riggs won her battle, and as of July 1, Kansas made it illegal for parents, or anyone, to allow minors to drink on their property -- whether they provide the alcohol or not.

It's called a Social Host Law, and more and more states are passing them. You might think the alcohol industry would be fighting this movement, but it's not.

"It's a recipe for disaster to take teens and alcohol and immaturity and mix them together," says Francine Katz, Anheuser-Busch's vice president for communications and consumer affairs.

A new ad with the company's chairman, August Busch III, tells parents it's their job to keep their kids from drinking: "At Anheuser-Busch, we're parents too, and we don't want teens to drink. … As parent, you have the greatest influence over your teen's decisions. Together, we can win this fight."

But not everybody's buying it.

"I find it hypocritical on the part of Anheuser-Busch," says Mosher. "They're very good at telling parents what to do. But, what about what they're doing? They're making the parents' job so much harder."

For instance, Anheuser-Busch has been fighting steps that Mosher says would actually reduce teen drinking, like raising taxes on beer. When cigarette taxes went up, there was a drop in teen smoking.

"The critics say that it's hypocritical for the company to be telling parents that it's their responsibility," says Stahl. "They say you're making it harder for parents to be responsible."

"Nobody is saying that this is somebody else's problem to solve," says Katz. "After all, we're parents, too."

"Well, you're beer-makers," says Stahl.

"We're beer-makers who are people," says Katz. "And I think that people understand that in the end, controlling what goes on with your child is the responsibility of the parent. It's not the public health field, it's not a beer company. It's you, with your own kids, addressing this issue as a parent."But parents are up against things like "alcopops," a new class of sweet, fruity drinks that beer-makers like Anheuser Busch are allowed to advertise on television. Mosher believes these ads, and the drinks, are aimed at teenagers -- and the strategy is paying off.

"They're most popular with young girls, and we're talking about eighth-grade girls," says Mosher.

What about the company's responsibility? "I just watched an ad," Stahl tells Katz. "It's so about youth and the fun of drinking. What about doing something about those ads?"

"It doesn't matter if a teen notices an ad, if they might laugh at an ad," says Katz.

But isn't the ad targeting young people? "Well, actually nobody in our ads is under the age of 25," says Katz. "So, it all depends on what your definition of young people is."

"But if you're a teenager, you want to be 25," says Stahl.

"Of course you do," says Katz. "You know, when you're a teenager, you want all the adult privileges. And our job as parents is to make our kids understand what is appropriate for them."

Katz points out that the Federal Trade Commission found no evidence that makers of alcopops are specifically targeting teenagers with their ads.

Meanwhile in Kansas, the cops are holding parents responsible. They're patrolling the streets in search of a party. If the parents allowed it, they'll be arrested, and Morrison will try to send them for a weekend in the county jail.

"I think the argument that I have a safe alcohol party for my kids is like saying, 'You can come over to my house and have sex. I'm gonna have a bunch of condoms down in the basement so we'll make sure that it's safe sex. But come on over, because I know you're gonna do it anyway. You can do it on the futon in my basement.' Would that be acceptable?" asks Morrison.

Bill and Pat Anderson say they would never host a party for kids to have sex or use illegal drugs. But did it cross their mind that they were in some way encouraging drinking?

"No. Quite honestly, I would prefer it if they didn't drink," says Bill Anderson. "However, if they're going to drink, my role as a parent is to ensure that my kids grow up ready for life, and that they grow up. And if your kids die in a drunk driving accident, you don't have that option."

So would he do it again?

"Absolutely," says Bill Anderson.

"One of the things that we've done, I think, for too long in this country, is say, 'You know what? Kids will always drink. I drank, my dad drank, his dad drank. Let's just accept it,'" says Morrison.

"I don't think that's a good way to handle a problem, because if you're gonna say that it's OK for parents to allow kids to consume illegal substances as long as they take their keys away from them, basically what you're saying is, 'We give up.'"