Spring Break Bust
Kids Are Now Partying Abroad
By Daniel Muniz

Spring break has always been synonymous with excessive drunkenness and uninhibited debauchery. And for many popular spring break destinations, the municipalities that hosted them didn’t mind how wild and outrageous this annual rite of passage had become as long as it brought in the expected infusion of millions of dollars to their local economies. After all, it was a lot of money that these kids were spending.

But everything has its price. Although the money was great, hedonism also has its own share of problems.

In addition to the revelry of lots of young girls flashing their bikini tops and bottoms as well as the endless number of wet t-shirt contests, the copious quantities of alcohol and illegal drugs that were consumed led to a lot of bad behavior. Local law enforcement agencies had to work around the clock to deal with drunken or stoned kids who got out of control and posed a significant threat to other drunken spring breakers.

Underage drinking was another big stigma that these municipalities didn’t want to deal with. Although it was easy to look the other way when a 19 or 20 year old was drinking, it was harder to ignore the multitudes of 14 or 15 year olds boozing it up. At spring break, alcohol was everywhere and readily available to anybody regardless of age. Over the years, it just became harder to overlook minors getting as wasted as their adult counterparts.

Furthermore, there was the correlation that a town that didn’t have any morals or boundaries also meant that it didn’t have any laws to abide by. Kids simply thought it was their right to trash the town they were partying in. As a result, the mayhem that hundreds of thousands of reckless and irresponsible teenage and college students caused a huge hangover that took far longer than a weekend for a municipality to get over.

And perhaps no city knows it better than Fort Lauderdale Florida, which practically invented the wet t-shirt contest.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was in 1985 when 380,000 students stormed the Florida town. Lured by cheap motels, free beer, raunchiness, and MTV, the kids trashed the city.

So the first thing that Fort Lauderdale did to revamp its image was to establish law and order even during spring break. Rules and boundaries is perhaps the antithesis of teenagers and college students because they enter a spring break destination expecting to get away with any kind of lewd and outrageous behavior.

Ordinances were passed that prohibited everything from open alcohol containers to sleeping in cars overnight at the beach. Traffic was rerouted to prevent cruising especially since kids were there to see and to be seen. But perhaps the most important development was that these new laws were actually enforced by the city which meant a crackdown on the free flowing booze that gushed throughout the city.

Of course a tourist town didn’t want to shun away all tourism, just the drunken revelers.

So instead of spring breakers, Fort Lauderdale now wanted the kind of responsible tourist that could spend money without wrecking the town. The city then invested in property upgrades and made an effort to attract high dollar resorts. They also expanded their airport, improved the beachfront, and built a new convention center.

The results were breathtaking.

Instead of being known as Fort Liquordale, the cheap motels that once packed a dozen kids into one room disappeared and high class resorts that charged several hundred dollars a night sprang up. Today, the city now sees more than a million upscale tourists who visit during March and April including lots of families. In fact, Fort Lauderdale is now able to boasts that it has a durable year round tourist trade.

As a result, many other spring break destinations such as Panama City Beach, Virginia Beach and South Padre Island have slowly begun to divest themselves from the allure of drunken spring breakers in an effort to attract more families and high dollar tourists. For example, at the height of its spring break revelry in 1993, Daytona Beach hosted 300,000 kids who came to party and get drunk. Today, that number is around 40,000 students and those kids now have very different upscale aspirations than their predecessors when it comes to rest and relaxation.

Overall, many of these cities are slowly transforming their towns into family friendly places.

Of course kids still want to get drunk and run around naked and do stupid things. And as long as there are still colleges and high schools and beer bongs, there will be spring break.

Accordingly, many spring breakers are now opting to experience their hedonism in Mexico, the Caribbean or on cruise ships. Foreign destinations appeal to teenagers and college students because of the looser laws and the tolerance of bad behavior in exchange for their beer money.

And perhaps the trade off has been worth it. These former spring break destinations had to put up with hundreds of thousands of immature kids who felt that it was their birthright to catch a sexually transmitted disease while they were acting like idiots for an entire week. Now places like Fort Lauderdale has responsible tourists visiting year round who are flashing credit cards instead of bikini tops.

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