Disturbing Finding on Young Drinkers Proves to Be Wrong
By TAMAR LEWIN
After several news organizations reported a finding that under-age drinkers
consumed a quarter of the nation's alcohol, the widely respected antidrinking
organization that issued the finding acknowledged that it had not applied the
usual statistical techniques in deriving that number, which would then have been
far smaller.
Indeed, the government agency on whose data the finding was based said that
by its own analysis, the actual figure for the proportion of alcohol consumed by
teenagers was 11.4 percent.
The study, "Teen Tipplers," was issued by Columbia University's National
Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, whose president, Joseph A. Califano
Jr., was secretary of health, education and welfare under Jimmy Carter. Based on
the data for teenagers, which were not inaccurate when applied to that subgroup,
the report estimated that five million high school students, or 31 percent,
engaged in binge drinking at least once a month. That is, they consumed five or
more drinks in a row.
But it was the 25-percent-of-all- alcohol finding that was the headline on
the news release that accompanied the 145-page report, and the one featured by
CNN, The Associated Press and other news organizations, including the Web site
of The New York Times. NBC also reported the 25
percent figure but added that the liquor industry and the government contended
that the real figure was more like 11 percent. Yesterday evening, The A.P. and
other news organizations began correcting the original figure.
The Columbia center said it had derived the data from the Household Survey on
Drug Abuse, a yearly poll of 25,500 people, conducted by the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration.
That survey includes nearly 10,000 people age 12 to 20, an oversampling
intended to ensure that there would be enough data from young people to make the
data statistically valid. So young people made up almost 40 percent of the
survey, although they make up less than 20 percent of the population. In
estimating their share of alcohol consumption, the center did not adjust the
data to account for the oversampling.
"It's very unfortunate," said Sue Foster, the center's vice president and
director of policy research. "We didn't reweight the data. But we think the 11.4
percent number is way too low, since there's so much underreporting."
What is beyond dispute in government studies is that teenage drinking remains
a serious problem. Although alcohol consumption by teenagers dropped sharply in
the 1980's, when states raised the drinking age to 21 from 18, that decline has
leveled off since the mid-1990's. From the 1950's to the 1990's, boys drank
considerably more than girls, but that gender gap has all but disappeared.
The sex-specific drinking data come from different government surveys, with
teenagers reporting higher rates of drinking in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey,
conducted in schools by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, than
they do in the annual National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, conducted in
homes. But both surveys show that teenage girls' drinking habits now mirror
those of teenage boys.
"The latest findings show no difference between teenage girls' drinking
habits and teenage boys'," said a spokeswoman for the C.D.C.
In the most recent school-based survey, 41 percent of the girls and 40
percent of the boys reported drinking alcohol in the last month.
Almost half the teenagers 14 to 18 have tried the new alcopops — fruit-
flavored malt-based alcoholic beverages with names like Hard Lemonade, Smirnoff
Ice, Skyy Blue, Tequiza and Hooper's Hooch. These drinks are particularly
appealing to the young because of their sweet taste. Teenagers were three times
more likely to know about these drinks than adults, and 14- to 16-year- olds
preferred them to beer.
While teenagers drink less frequently than adults, they tend to drink larger,
more dangerous amounts at one time. The study found that at whatever age teenage
boys and girls begin to drink, they almost always continue to drink as they get
older.
The household survey found that while the proportion of teenagers who engage
in binge drinking has declined, the gender gap has narrowed. In 1998, 6.6
percent of girls and 8.7 percent of boys 12 to 17 reported binge drinking,
compared with 11 percent of the girls and nearly 19 percent of the boys a decade
earlier.
In an increasingly egalitarian society, it is perhaps not surprising that
what was mostly a boys' misbehavior would spread to girls. Or that treatment
centers would be seeing more young girls.
"Historically, you'd see a few girls here and there, but rarely was there a
waiting list," said David Rosenker, vice president of adolescent services at the
Caron Foundation, a Pennsylvania residential treatment center with 12 beds for
girls and 24 for boys. "In the past two or three years, though, we've seen maybe
a 30 percent increase in girls, and now there's consistently a waiting list. So
we're adding four more beds for girls."
Natalie, 17, a senior at a Brooklyn private school who attends Alcoholics
Anonymous meetings, remembers the first time she got drunk: she was 12 and in
charge of the bar at her grandmother's New Year's party.
"I made this rum punch, and no one was drinking it, so I decided I would
drink it," she said. "I was dancing around, and everyone was laughing, and I
remember it boosted my confidence a lot that everyone was paying so much
attention to me. I think I always thought of alcohol as sort of a girl thing, a
thing for girls who didn't want to be goody-goodys."
At 13, Natalie and her two best friends drank together. By 14, Natalie was
drinking heavily. She was also using drugs and getting in real trouble. The low
point, she said, was finding herself on the Lower East Side, drinking gin out of
a McDonald's coffee cup, when a homeless
man who had overdosed on heroin died right in front of her.
"I don't want to drink ever again; I know where drinking takes me, and it's
not pretty," said Natalie, who went into treatment at 14 and has been sober for
three years, regularly attending Thursday night meetings in a young people's AA
group called Never Had a Legal Drink.
In many ways, Mr. Rosenker and other experts said, Natalie's story is typical
of girls with alcohol problems. Among the common factors were that her first
alcohol came from her family, that others in the family had been problem
drinkers — in her case, a grandmother who is a recovering alcoholic — and that
she quickly began mixing alcohol use with drugs.
Natalie says there is no stigma over drinking in her high school world.
"Everyone drinks," she said, "it's socially accepted."
Bron: New York Times, 27-02-2002
| 
Zend
deze pagina naar een vriend