Teens drink quarter of all alcohol consumed in US
WASHINGTON, Feb 26 (Reuters) - Teen tipplers drink a quarter of all alcohol consumed in the United States, encouraged by television ads and parents who see underage drinking as a rite of passage, researchers said on Tuesday.
The legal drinking age in the United States is 21, but Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse found 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 bingeing as a rite of passage," said Joseph Califano, the group's president and a former U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare.
The Columbia report highlighted the under-15s as an alcoholic trouble spot. Califano said since 1975, the number of children who begin drinking at 15 or under had jumped by almost a third, from 27 percent to 36 percent.
"And those who begin drinking before age 15 are four times likelier to become alcoholics than those who do not drink before age 21," he added.
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.
But 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.
UNDERAGE TIPPLES BY BUSH TWINS
Underage drinking sporadically hits the headlines, with two notable cases involving President George W. Bush's twin daughters. College students Barbara and Jenna Bush, 20, attended alcohol awareness classes after being charged with underage drinking last year.
Nudged into second place by drug abuse, researchers said underage drinking is not discussed enough and the center wants the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy to broaden its focus and include alcohol in its media campaigns.
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.
Two months ago, NBC ended a decades-old voluntary abstinence when it became the first major network to broadcast a hard liquor advertisement on national television.
Lawmakers criticized NBC, a unit of General Electric Co. (GE.N), saying it was putting profits before prudence.
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. But she acknowledged NBC's decision complicated the situation.
"It's certainly going to be an uphill battle. But what we hope to do is break open a national dialogue," Foster said.