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More Teen Drinking lol
THE NEW REPUBLIC
DAILY EXPRESS
Drunk on Hysteria
by Michelle Cottle
Only at TNR Online | Post date 03.01.02
The CNN.com headline spread its message of woe across my computer screen, "STUDY: TEENS ARE DRINKING--A LOT." It seems the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University had just announced that "[n]early a third of high school students say they binge drink at least once a month, according to a report that says underage drinkers now account for 25 percent of the alcohol consumed in this country." As Joseph Califano, head of CASA warned, "Underage drinking has reached epidemic proportions in America."
As with any data suggesting the moral decline of today's youth, the bad news spread like wildfire. Media outlets from Omaha to New York to San Francisco (To Greek Chat)reported the horrific specifics of CASA's survey--along with the center's prescription for how to halt this growing threat. Among the more ambitious recommendations was for the government to launch a crusade against underage drinking, fund more treatment centers, and ban all television ads for alcohol (including beer). This report, Califano concluded, "is a clarion call for a national mobilization to curb underage drinking."
No, it is not. Rather, it is, as Michael Kinsley subsequently noted in The Washington Post, a prime illustration of the nation's "social hypochondria," our tendency to blow certain (admittedly real) problems all out of proportion until they seem on the verge of destroying us. Yes, the number of underage drinkers in this country is troubling. Teens are prone to indulge in really stupid, risky behavior even when not under the influence. And some of CASA's recommendations may be worthy--if hopelessly utopian. Unfortunately, the center's alarmist overselling of its survey findings, and the attendant media hysteria, actively undermine any serious discussion about teens and alcohol.
For starters, some of the supposedly horrific findings aren't really all that alarming. For instance, news outlets noted that 87 percent of adults who drink had their first drink before age 21. And? Let's set aside for a moment that, until the mid 1980s, the legal drinking age was 19. How many of you out there didn't, at some point before you got the legal green light, share a beer with your dad or sneak a glass of champagne at your fat cousin's wedding? Now, absolutely, we should be concerned about kids who are regular drinkers by age 16. But CASA has no interest in making those distinctions, decrying parents who consider any sort of underage encounter with alcohol as "a rite of passage rather than a deadly round of Russian roulette."
The media also spotlighted CASA's findings that 31 percent of teens "binge drink" at least once a month. This certainly sounds ominous. No one likes the thought of their precious adolescent downing Jello shots until they're blind drunk. It should be noted, however, that "binge drinking" is defined as the consumption of at least four drinks in an hour (Actually in a sitting) for women, five for men. Is this healthy for developing minds and bodies? Certainly not. But the news that, one Saturday night a month, a college sophomore is apt to down four or five beers is hardly a sign of impending national disaster.
And even people who would consider it a national disaster have something to cheer about. Despite the apocalyptic rhetoric, the data actually show that teen binge drinking has been falling in recent years. As The New York Times later reported, "In 1998, 6.6 percent of girls and 8.7 percent of boys 12 to 17 reported binge drinking, compared with 11 percent of the girls and nearly 19 percent of the boys a decade earlier."
Among the most disturbing statistics was the news that underage drinking accounts for 25 percent of all alcohol consumption in the United States--disturbing in part because it represented a sizable jump from previous years. Of course, as it turns out, that statistic is flat-out wrong. Califano and company screwed up their math, oversampling teens and then failing to correct for that oversampling in their final calculations. When the liquor companies cried foul, CASA admitted that the number was, in fact, only 11.4 percent, a number right in line with past reports. Unrepentant, however, CASA insisted that, sure the hard data didn't support the 25 percent figure--but they were sticking by it anyway, in large part because they suspect serious underreporting among the teens surveyed.
Well, heck, if personal belief is the new standard, this could make surveys a lot more fun. Let's see, I believe that 85 percent of people who voted for Representative Tom Delay also beat their wives. Do I have the numbers to back that up? Not really. But you know how hesitant people are to admit backing Delay.
Then there were the overwrought quotes by CASA staff. My favorite was from Sue Foster, head of policy research: "Alcohol is far and away the top drug of abuse for American kids." Of course it is! It is the teen drug of choice, and by the way, the adult drug of choice, for a very good reason. Unlike crack, smack, x, crystal meth, and pot, alcohol is, in fact, an enormous, inescapable, overwhelmingly legal part of our culture. And you can impose all the age restrictions you want and lecture young people as often as you like that some pleasures are for adults only; that will largely serve to convince them that drinking is precisely what they need to do to prove their maturity, to assert their independence, to be, in a word, cool. Anyway, would you really prefer it if more teens were shooting crank on the weekends?
None of this is to suggest that we should throw up our hands and buy a round of ripple for the playground. The number of regular and heavy teen drinkers is still too high, and CASA did reveal a couple of disturbing trends. For starters, the gender gap is narrowing for underage drinking--terrible news considering that alcohol poses greater physical risks for girls than boys. Also (assuming of course that these numbers aren't wrong as well), CASA found that kids are taking their first drink at an earlier age: In 1975, 27 percent of high school seniors had tried alcohol by the eighth grade. By 1999, that number was at 36 percent.
But CASA's insistence on lumping all these examples into one nightmarish "epidemic" draws attention (and resources) away from these obviously more troubling developments. (Even those who abhor underage drinking of all sorts can admit that the image of an eleven year old with taste for Zima is decidedly more chilling than that of a college junior who fancies Bud.) The hysteria decreases the odds of our conducting a rational discourse on this subject with teenagers (who have a finely tuned radar for hysterical adult B.S.). And by refusing to acknowledge that we have made some progress--namely, the decade-long decline in binge drinking--we miss a chance to learn from our success and replicate it.
Ultimately, reports like CASA's just encourage us to sit around biting our nails, fretting that the next drop of alcohol to touch an underage lip will topple the Republic. They foster an atmosphere of panic and hopelessness--enough, you might say, to force a person to drink.
Michelle Cottle is a senior editor at TNR.
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