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Surveys vary on prevalence of teenage drinking

Sunday, January 05, 2003

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Has teenage drinking really gotten worse, as a generation of children raised in relative freedom by their baby boomer parents come of age? Or does it only seem that way in some communities?

It depends on which study you're viewing.There's good news from a highly reputable annual survey of 44,000 eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders, conducted by the University of Michigan. Over the past two decades, the percentage of high school students who report using alcohol has declined significantly. Even binge drinking is down, overall, from 20 years ago, although it did increase in the 1990s before dropping again in 2002.

Administered by the university's Institute of Social Research and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the survey asks students to fill out anonymous questionnaires, although seniors are asked to identify themselves so they can be tracked as adults. The study has been carefully designed to account for error and teenage embellishment, said Lloyd Johnston, its author.

But how to explain another national study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released in late December, which shows that binge drinking shot up by 17 percent among 18- to 20-year-olds between 1993 and 2001?

It's not hard to reconcile the numbers, Johnston said. The CDC's 17 percent figure is close to a 15 percent increase in binge drinking that the Michigan study found among a younger group of high-schoolers between 1993 and 1998.

But the Michigan study also found a drop in binge drinking in 2002, notably by 10th-graders. The drop, from 24.9 percent to 22.4 percent, mirrors other slight declines found among eighth-graders and high school seniors from a year earlier. The CDC doesn't have figures for 2002.

And unlike the Michigan study, the CDC's data don't go back to 1980, when binge drinking was far more prevalent than it is now.

Over a 22-year period, in fact, the consumption of five or more drinks in a row has dropped from 41.2 percent to 28.6 percent. And overall, the decrease in underage drinking is dramatic: In 1980, 72 percent of all high school seniors reported using alcohol; in 2002, that number was down to 48.6 percent.

A commensurate dip in fatal car accidents involving underage drinking occurred during that same time period, according to another study released last month by the National Commission on Drunk Driving, which found that crashes dropped 46 percent among all age groups between 1982 and 2001.

Johnston does caution, however, that the national survey wasn't designed to pick up local trends. There was much media coverage of an incident in Scarsdale, N.Y., last fall, where so many students turned up drunk at the high school's homecoming that officials were forced to cancel it. And more than 100 teenagers in Leawood, Kan., were arrested last summer at a party, where 19 officers from four departments were sent to control the chaos. The parents of the underage host of the party were not home. Other regional studies echo that less-rosy picture:

In El Paso, Texas, for example, a survey found that the number of young people returning drunk from Mexico had increased from 600 in 1998 to 1,600 this year. In Revere, Mass., the number of students using alcohol rose to 83 percent this year, up from 80 percent in 1999. Another study of suburban high schools outside Cleveland produced one more disturbing statistic: More than one-fourth of all students had their first drink before age 13.

Still, Johnson said, his numbers prove that when teenagers are taught about risks, they listen.

"The decline in underage drinking can be tied to education campaigns that began in the 1980s, as well as the increase in the legal drinking age to 21," Johnston said. "That's the most obvious explanation we can think of."

Mackenzie Carpenter can be reached at mcarpenter@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1949.

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