I live on the east coast and it ' s definitely enforced here . My sister had 3 underage drinking tickets when she was underage . Hell , one of those times , she didn ' t even have alcohol on her , was just walking back to her apartment from another apartment with her friends and a cop stopped them to check . She and her friends have also been pulled over while being in the same neighborhood that a party was taking place , and the cops tried to search her car for alcohol and drugs . When I was in college , our friends dared my boyfriend to walk back to our dorm without his shirt in the middle of January . A cop stopped us to make sure he wasn ' t drunk . Ticketing underage drinking is an easy moneymaker for them .