Today’s parents face new challenges with ‘covert’ alcohol and drug use

WARREN

It’s hard for parents today to know the best way to guide their children through the years of teen and young-adult alcohol and drug experimentation because so much has changed since today’s parents were teens.

Thirty years ago, a policy change mandated by Congress approving the National Minimum Legal Drinking Act forced the states to change their legal drinking age to 21.

Ohio raised the drinking age from 18 to 19 in 1984 and to 21 in 1987, which is similar to what happened across the country.

That changed the venue for drinking and reduced the number of alcohol-related crashes and deaths, experts say, but it didn’t stop drinking. It moved it to other locations, like homes, cars and outdoor locations, according to young adults interviewed for this story.

Michael Albanese, who retired two years ago from the Warren Police Department after 40 years as a patrolman and sergeant, said not only did the drinking law shut down numerous bars, but the movement led by Mothers Against Drunk Driving also changed the way people viewed drunken driving.

He spent much of his time in the 1970s working midnight turn, answering one call after another for intoxication-related problems. They would come at midnight, at 2:30 when bars were closing, at 4 a.m. when people were eating at an all-night restaurant and at 5 a.m. when they got home to a disapproving spouse.

Today the drunken driving law makes it illegal to drive with a blood-alcohol level of 0.08. It used to be 0.19, and the tools for detecting drunkenness were less scientific in the 1970s — no “horizontal gaze” field test, for example — so fewer drunken driving citations were written, Albanese said.

But in more recent years, Albanese said he began to notice that alcohol use among young people he came in contact with had dropped in favor of drugs.

“There’s a lot of people — including adults — riding around in cars or over at friends houses” doing drugs, he said.

According to a 2009 study led by Dr. Karen Norberg, Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, the higher drinking age dramatically reduced the amount of alcohol abuse in American life. It also, in fact, reduced the number of people reporting drug addictions, it said.

The results of the study were presented with a focus on adults now 44 years of age and older, the ones who were exposed to legal alcohol at a young age.

... Read more in Sunday's Vindicator!