Survey: Teenage drinking still issue

The biggest problem is that they’re starting earlier,
findings show.

CONTRA COSTA TIMES

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — With an empty martini glass at her elbow, teenager Serena van der Woodsen, star of the CW’s “Gossip Girl,” leans against the tony Manhattan bar and blithely downs another vodka concoction, unscathed.

It’s no surprise the frothy series about the sexy lifestyle of Upper East Side prepsters has some parents and reviewers in an uproar over its glamorized glimpse of underage drinking.

But the truth is, though American youths may not knock back limoncello and champagne as blithely as couture-clad Serena, TV shows such as “Gossip Girl” offer a fairly accurate depiction of teen partying across the country.

According to the U.S. surgeon general’s office, underage consumption of beer and alcohol accounts for a quarter of alcohol sales.

The truth is also that many parents are in denial.

Parents think, “Oh, not my wonderful children,” said Orinda parenting expert Ksenija Soster Olmer. “They pretend it’s not happening, that it couldn’t happen to their family.”

But according to the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, it is happening — to 11 million youths ages 12 to 20.

Although the overall percentage of drinkers has held fairly steady for the past five years, the most recent statistics from that survey show teens have begun drinking at younger ages, and binge drinking has surged — nearly 7.2 million teens reporting they sometimes down five or more alcoholic beverages in a single sitting.

It’s the middle school numbers that psychologist Sara Denman of Danville finds most alarming. Teen drinking is not just glamorized, she said, “it’s accepted. It’s expected. Now, if you’re not going to [drink], you hold a beer so people think you are.”

It’s “an epidemic of underage drinking that germinates in elementary and middle school with 9- to 13-year-olds and erupts on college campuses, where 44 percent of students binge drink,” said Columbia University’s Joseph Califano Jr., who heads the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.

A fifth of California’s seventh-graders have drank alcohol — not sipped or tasted, but consumed at least one alcoholic drink, according to the most recent California Healthy Kids Survey. Nine percent have imbibed until they became very drunk or threw up.

The numbers go up from there. A quarter of the state’s high school freshmen and 41 percent of its juniors say they have been very drunk at least once; 21 percent of the 182,000 juniors polled had binged within a month of taking the survey.

“When teens drink, they don’t think about the consequences,” the Diablo Valley (Calif.) College psychology professor said. “They drink to have fun, to make talking easier, to lose inhibitions. I’m not sure if showing consequences makes much difference.”

Now, recent research has tied early drinking to adult alcoholism. A teen who begins drinking before age 15 is four times more likely to develop alcohol dependency as an adult.