i transfered to a school in new hampshire in the fall of 2001, a few months before my 21st birthday. i did not know it at the time, but the state that claims to "live free or die" has rediculous enforcement of alcohol laws. well, i found out pretty quickly... like the first day. put in cuffs, taken down to the towny police station, given a ticket for underage drinking just a few months before my 21st birthday. 300 something dollar fine, and if i had a new hampshire issued liscense it would have been suspended, but i didn't 'cause mine was issued in new york, so that wasn't an issue.
went to court, paid the fine. end of story.
did it suck? yea... was i annoyed? yea... was it my fault for breaking the law? yea.
it may be bullshit, but it's still breaking the law. for the record, i was picked up while walking down a public street with an unopened beer visable in my rear pants pocket. in other words, i was stupid.
another time later that year a teammate of mine got picked up for underaged drinking... 10 minutes before turning 21. we were all drinking in his dorm room waiting for it to get to midnight so that we could go down to the bar and do some shots for his birthday. when it got to 10 minutes to 12, we started walking across campus... now each of us had beers with us (campus security at this college was terrible) and were drinking them, but we all discarded the beer cans before we left the enclosed part of the campus and out onto the very much in public road... all of us except for brian, that is, who was wearing a yellow hard hat (don't ask why... i do not know) and still carrying his beer, happy that he was finally abou to turn 21. so we get to the road, i see a cop down the road, see brian with his beer, and tell him to dump his beer, to which he replies something along the line of "screw that i'm 21 now i can do whatever i want." long story short, the cop drives past us, pulls a U-ee, pulls up next to us, and now brian finally decides to toss his beer away. they put him in cuffs and take him away, the car finally pulling away just as the clock strikes midnight on his 21st birthday.
now the cops weren't douches about it... they put down that the arrest happened at 12:01, so he avoided the underage. but he still got two 50 dollar citations... one for having an open container, and one for littering (which was dropped in court). once again... stupid, but totaly not hte cop's fault. they're just doing their job.
on a side note, after processing my friend that night, the cops drove him to the bar and dropped him off.
on another side note, the cops then waited in the parking lot of the bank next door and would arrest my visiting friend from home later that night for disorderly conduct... aka he took a piss outside. when told that the cops were around the corner, his only answer was "i can't stop once i start... it stings"
oh and one of our friends was on the lacrosse team and had a game the next day so he wasn't drinking, so he videotaped the entire night just to keep himself entertained. you can own a copy for 10 bucks
- it sounds as though your major complaint about the whole thing is that is just wasn't fair, because you were almost, practically, just about, right before 21. So what. You broke the law, you got caught - accept the consequences of your actions and deal with it. 
college kids as hard and as often as they can. we're paying $10,000+ per semester to go up here for school, and they gotta try to rack up as many fines as they can for chickenshit offenses. and don't say "well they're just upholding the law", bullshit. back home the cops dont give a fuck about underage drinking.
