Underage Drinking Article
 

NEW YORK (CNN) - The problem of binge drinking begins well before
teenagers set foot on a college campus, according to researchers at
Columbia University...

The researchers said many parents are "unwitting coconspirators," whose
ambivalence contributes to the problem of teen drinking...

The twoyear study concluded that kids are trying their first drinks at
younger ages. Thirtysix percent of the high school graduating class of 1999
began using alcohol in eighth grade or even earlier, researchers found. For
the class of 1975, that number was 27 percent, they noted....

...the study did not conclude that the overall number of student drinkers is
on the rise...

Underage drinkers consumed as much as $27 billion worth of alcohol in 1998
- $15 billion on beer alone. That represents about a quarter of all alcohol
sold in the United States that year.

The authors call their report "the most ambitious assessment of the extent
and consequences of underage drinking in America."

Researchers analyzed existing data and surveyed 900 adults on their
attitudes toward underage drinking.

In my experience ... and of course it is only that, it's not hard data ... those kids who drank the most in college were those whose parents never let them drank anything at all and didn't prepare them to make decisions on their own. My parents let me have some alcohol in high school (like a glass of champagne at new years - not keg parties), so drinking wasn't some exotic thing when I got to college.

I honestly didn't know anyone who drank in high school, and since my school was 1600 kids I'm sure that statistically some of them must have. But I don't think most of those kids ended up in college.

I saw a thing on the news about this last night, and apparently, the numbers with the CASA study don't jive with numbers done through a study at Harvard just 2 years ago. Point being, kids do drink, and this study points to the fact that most kids are getting it from their own homes. No big surprise to me!