Pizzerias join Smithtown initiative to help combat underage drinking 

Order a pizza from any of about a dozen Smithtown pizzerias this fall, and it may come with a small sticker on the top of the box: “Preventing underage drinking is everyone’s responsibility.”

The 3,200 stickers, placed by the Smithtown Horizons Counseling & Education Center and the town’s Youth Bureau, in cooperation with 13 area pizzerias, are intended to nudge families into conversation, said Madlyn Makboulian, a Horizons community coordinator.

“We’re trying to engage the community and get people thinking about it a little more,” she said of the Pizza Box Top Project. “It’s a bigger problem than people sometimes recognize.”

More than three quarters of Suffolk County high school seniors have had at least one drink, according to a 2014-2015 New York State’s Youth Development Survey. Most often, young people said, they got the alcohol from acquaintances. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that slightly more than a quarter of Long Islanders aged 12-20 said they drank alcohol over the period ranging from 2014 to 2016, above the New York State figure of 23.5 percent. 

Makboulian and Kelly DeVito, a youth services coordinator for the town, said they believed Smithtown’s numbers were roughly comparable to those figures: not at crisis levels, they said, but high enough and persistent enough to be troubling.  

Underage drinking can interfere with brain development, Makboulian said.

According to DeVito, “The younger a person starts using alcohol, the more likely they are later in life to develop a substance abuse disorder. This is a nice way to get young people involved.”

The New York State Liquor Authority found about 17 sales of alcohol to a minor by businesses in Smithtown over the past five years. Most of the violations were the result of sting operations with underage decoys. The number of violations is not exact because the agency tracks violations by ZIP code, and some codes include portions of Smithtown as well as neighboring municipalities. Over the same period, the agency found 235 violations in Suffolk County and 7,018 in New York State.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday announced a joint effort by the Liquor Authority and the Department of Motor Vehicles to crack down on underage drinking on college campuses and in college towns as the fall semester begins. 

Smithtown's pizza box program is in its third year. Horizons also works with area liquor store owners to prevent underage sales. In its Sticker Shock program, store owners sign a pledge to require two forms of identification before selling to customers who look younger than 30.

In a statement about the program on Smithtown's website, Town Supervisor Edward Wehrheim said: “I couldn’t be more proud of this initiative. As a grandpa I couldn’t be more grateful.”

Horizons, founded in 1979, is a town department whose employees counsel 75 to 100 adolescent and adult substance users every year. The center has an operating budget of about $1.4 million, mostly funded by Suffolk County.