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| Customers adopting standard privacy
protection to buy a bottle of beer |
Bottles of alcohol should be tagged so adults buying drink for under-18s can be traced by police, a Labour MSP has said. Under the scheme, bottles would bear a printed barcode enabling authorities to track whether legally bought alcohol has been given
to youngsters. The scheme, which is already being piloted in areas of Dundee, involves the police seizing alcohol from under-18s and then using the coded bottle labels to trace where the drink was bought from. Officers then use CCTV from
the shop to identify who bought the drink - whether it was an adult or an under-age customer being illegally sold it. Customers are even easier to trace if they use store cards. Labour's Orwellian sounding 'community safety' spokesman James Kelly
wants to roll out the scheme to other parts of the country and says the Scottish Government should encourage licensing boards to sign up to the initiative. Although the scheme aims to catch shops selling alcohol to under-age customers, it is also
used to target proxy purchases - adults buying drink on behalf of minors. Those caught supplying alcohol to those under the age of 18 would be reported to the procurator-fiscal and could be hit with a fine of up to £5,000 or a prison
sentence. The scheme is understood to cost less than £100 per shop to run and authoritarians claim it would reduce alcohol-fuelled antisocial behaviour in areas with under-age drinking problems. | 
