New study finds teens drink at high levels - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

Modern Brewery Age, March 4, 2002

According to a new study released by Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, teenagers drink a quarter of all alcohol consumed in the United States. Researchers said they found that 31 percent of high school students binge drink, defined as five drinks in a row, at least once a month.

"Underage drinking has reached epidemic proportions in America... and parents are too often unwitting co-conspirators who tend to see drinking and occasional binging as a rite of passage," Joseph Califano, the group's president and a former U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare told Reuters.

Califano said since 1975, the number of teens under 15 drinking alcohol had jumped by almost a third, from 27 percent to 36 percent. "Those who begin drinking before age 15 are four times likelier to become alcoholics than those who do not drink before age 21," Califano said.

Researchers reanalyzed data from the 1998 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse to calculate the total number of drinks consumed by 12- to 20-year-olds as a proportion of all adults.

The report found those under 20 drank 63,230 alcoholic beverages a month, an average of 0.9 a day, and slightly more than 25 percent of the 251,194 alcoholic drinks consumed monthly by the sample as a whole.

The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States challenged the consumption percentage, saying the Columbia group had not properly balanced the data.

"As a result of this fundamental flaw in methodology, they seriously misstated the facts by a factor of nearly 50 percent. The real number is probably 11 or 12 percent," the council's spokesman Frank Coleman said.

The Columbia report pooled data from five different surveys and separately polled 900 adults to gauge attitudes to alcohol with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Nearly three-quarters of adults surveyed said they supported restrictions on alcohol advertising.

The Columbia center's director of policy research, Susan Foster, said the group would recommend an end to all television ads for alcohol, which would include beer as well as spirits.