Weed and fruit scented tobacco wafted above the sea of sweaty Spring breakers packed onto the deck at Harpoon Harry’s in Panama City Beach, Florida, Thursday.
Tennessee frat boys lifted two bikini wearing twenty-somethings onto their shoulders while a pink haired Gen-Zer waved a Coors Light as a man twerked on all fours to a bass-heavy remix of Van Halen’s “Panama”.
Across the dancefloor a mustachioed Timothee Chalamet look-a-like’s eyes rolled back under his bucket hat while a bouncer closed off the bathroom due to a “vomiting incident.”
“We had to take five knives today,” a bullet proof vest clad security guard told The Post, of confiscating weapons from a group earlier in the afternoon ahead of rapper G-Eazy’s performance.
This is Spring Break along the Gulf of America, where The Post can report kids are smuggling cocaine, ecstasy and weed from other states, dealing on the streets, flashing fake ID’s and downing Miami Vice frozen cocktails in Stanley cup-sized portions before hooking up.
Southern teen and college students – primarily from Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina – flood “The 30A” as it is known, a term describing the party scene between Destin and Panama City Beach on the panhandle, named for the beach road between them.
“It’s ‘Jersey Shore’ on crack. Everyone’s down to do whatever,” Katie, 25, from Tampa said, referring to the MTV reality show.
Casual sex and drugs
There is no shortage of shirtless, horny young men on the beaches and in the bars, most of whom seem to be intoxicated before the sun even sets.
“If you come when Alabama’s here, it’s great. Alabama girls are slutty. They’re here to party. There’s a lot of Tennessee people here – Midwest and Southern people are a little less hook-upy. Georgia, they’re pretty slutty,” one 20-year-old reveler from Missouri said of the hook-up culture.
Upstairs at a Panama City Beach bar, a 22-year-old senior studying finance told The Post the drug scene is rampant – and easily accessible.
“Cocaine. Weed. Molly – everywhere. [Spring breakers] do it mostly in their rooms. They’ll take Molly and they’ll go to the party. Cocaine they’ll do in the bathroom. Weed they’re going to be smoking on the balcony. We bring it. We just get it at home. You don’t want to trust getting it out here,” the college student, from Joplin, Missouri, told The Post.
“Coke. That’s all I do,” he added, noting the drug cost $150 a gram for a small bag of “around 20 lines” – up from the usually $70 he pays back home.
“Some people know its spring break and they come here to sell drugs.” When asked whether he is worried it could being cut with ultra-deadly fentanyl, he added: “It depends how [the drug dealer] looks. If they’re wearing their Tennessee frat shirt maybe, but they gotta go first. They’re dying before I am.”
Fake IDs, easy underage access
Two 20-year-old sophomores from East Tennessee State University told The Post they purchased fake Georgia state IDs “because they use a black and white photo and it’s easier to get away with.”
“I got my fake ID my junior year of high school from a random guy. It’s been working [in Panama City Beach] so far,” one of the 20-year-old sophomores said of getting entry into bars, noting they never scanned her ID.
“A lot of people have fakes and people drink underage.”
A security guard at Harpoon Harry’s told The Post the biggest troubles they face apart from weapons are issues of tolerance – or rather lack of – among the young revelers.
“If you’re really messed up, we’ll get you a cab. The biggest issue is people getting overly intoxicated. Kids get DUIs,” they said, noting that drug use is a problem.
“You can tell when they’re on [cocaine]. They’re moving a thousand miles an hour. Ecstasy is a big thing. A lot of kids bring it, college kids,” a second security guard said.
While Florida’s panhandle embraces the partying, other major spring break destinations in the state like Miami Beach have cracked down in recent years.
In Miami there are strict rules: Closing up parking garages, hiking up rates to park, doubling towing rates and enlisting DUI and security checkpoints, many brought in after two shootings rocked the community during a chaotic Spring Break in 2022. The measures have resulted in 13% fewer spring break related arrests this year compared to last, NBC Miami reported.
However, on Saturday night The Post witnessed a college aged kid get injured on Las Olas Beach in Fort Lauderdale. He was taken to the hospital after his eyes appeared to roll back in his head. Florida police also broke up a “large, non-permitted spring break gathering” on Sunny Isles Beach between Miami and Fort Lauderdale on March 21 after party-goers flocked over to the beach party when it was promoted on TikTok.
Parties on Snapchat
In Seaside, an upscale community along the 30A, officials have implemented a 7 p.m. curfew – an hour earlier from last year’s 8 p.m. – for unaccompanied minors 18 and under without parental supervision from March 1 through April 25.
But that’s not stopping kids from storming house parties in the area where, they say, anything goes.
“I’m hosting a rager — pull up. As long as you’re okay with seeing alcohol and drugs,” one 16-year-old male staying in a house in Seaside told The Post Wednesday night.
A group of 12 sophomores and juniors aged 15 and 16 from Oklahoma, who rented a house in Seaside for $2,500 for the week using “birthday and Christmas money saved,” told The Post.
They said they blindly walked into a house they found from a ‘Snap Map,’ a feature in Snapchat that lets users share their location with friends and view Snaps from other users in their same location.
“There are Snapchat group chats with 100s of people who are going to be here [in Seaside and along 30A]. They share a link from TikTok with the parties. You don’t know if they’re normal. Sometimes they’re weird,” Samantha, 16, who declined to give her last name, told The Post.
A spokesperson for the Walton County Sheriff’s office told The Post parents will often rent homes for their teenagers in the 30A area and property owners often don’t know who is really staying in the home.
“We had an arrest the other day where this group got evicted from a house because the person who rented the house was not 18 and somehow it slipped on Airbnb. We found a stolen gun and a lot of marijuana and we made an arrest,” they said of the group, who came in from Decatur, Georgia.
The Walton County community also partnered with Igbo, a new app designed to let parents track teen’s location information and group messages with their parents. The app shows a pin when someone’s child is within 50 yards of another child who has the app.
Local teens, like Walton County-based Brooke Moran, 18, a high school senior, told The Post they’re no fan of spring break and Seaside has been overrun with rich tourists trashing the beach and acting entitled.
“We don’t like these people. They’re extremely rude. This is what Seaside wants. They want these rich blonde girls to come here and buy their stuff. Seaside is the most expensive place in the Panhandle.
“All the girls out here love Lululemon, they act so uppity and they’re all doing coke in the bathroom,” another 18-year-old from Seaside said. Somewhat ironically, later that night The Post spotted an apparently tongue-in-cheek “Please Don’t Do Coke in the Bathroom” neon sign hanging by the women’s restroom at the The RedBar in Grayton Beach.
“We aren’t spending our money on that s—t,” Moran told The Post. “We’re going to Walmart.”
