Marketing encourages teen drinking

Our children live in an alcohol-saturated culture. The threat of alcohol abuse is so pervasive that we don’t even see it anymore. But with 80 percent of Maine high school seniors having started to drink and nearly half reporting that they drink regularly, alcohol is by far the biggest drug threat facing our families.

Alcohol is much more heavily advertised and far more available than it was 20 or 30 years ago. It’s everywhere we look. In my supermarket, I find wine with the pasta, hard liquor in the same aisle as pet food, and beer with the trash bags. Three grocery aisles are devoted to alcohol, each with multiple promotions either on the end caps or throughout the aisle. How many coolers are stocked with beer at the place where you buy gas? How many places can you purchase alcohol in your town?

In any entry-level marketing course, a student learns about the four P’s: product, price, placement and promotion. The marketing of alcohol has turned from targeting baby boomers – a big market, but we’re beginning to consume less as we grow older – to targeting the “echo boom,” our children, aged 10-21. The battle for their business is being fought with all four P’s.

Product: It used to be that rats used in alcoholism research were trained to drink by giving them alcohol sweetened heavily with sugar; it was the only way to get even genetically bred alcoholic rats to take those first few sips. We are now introducing “entry level drinkers” – our children – to alcohol in the same manner. The hard liquor industry has created new beverages that target inexperienced drinkers and eliminate the need to acquire a taste for alcohol. These drinks, which the industry calls flavored malt beverages and we call “alcopops,” are sweet and taste like the lemonade or soda that kids are used to drinking. Beer companies are marketing a new lineup of sweet drinks specifically aimed at drawing more young women to their products. Some of these drinks add high levels of caffeine and tout themselves as helping you stay awake through a long night of drinking – allowing our children to consume more alcohol than they normally would be able to.

Price: Industry lobbyists have worked hard to prevent state and federal government from increasing taxes in order to keep the price of their product as low as possible. They almost succeeded in lowering the federal tax last year. We know that increasing the tax on tobacco has been a primary factor in reducing the amount of smoking in this country. The alcohol industry worries that it will be next, and has spent millions of dollars lobbying our legislators to maintain low tax rates.

Placement: When we were growing up, alcohol sales were restricted far more than they are now. There were special stores where hard liquor was sold and they were few and far between. For years, the industry has lobbied to loosen up sales restrictions. Now, you can buy alcohol virtually anytime and anywhere in Maine. Still, they want to be able to ship it right to your home and for there to be even more alcohol outlets in your town.

Promotion: Since 80 percent of all high school seniors have already had their first drink, make no mistake, the liquor industry is working overtime to develop early brand preference and loyalty. Unfortunately, adults don’t see much of this marketing, as we are not the target of it. Watch an episode of “The OC” – a drama about high school students – with your teenager. You will be surprised at the quantity of alcohol consumed and the brands wielded in every episode. Showing drinking in movies and television shows has two purposes. It advertises specific brands to a specific audience and it normalizes the consumption of alcohol by the type of person portrayed drinking in the show. If teens didn’t think drinking in high school was normal and accepted, watching teen TV shows will definitely change their perception.

Alcohol kills more people than any other drug. If we are to make the world safer for our children, we must address this threat, which is far more common than any of the drugs we normally worry about. We need to pay attention to, and express our outrage at, the ways alcohol marketing has permeated our children’s lives. Let your legislators know how you feel about easy access and ubiquitous marketing of alcohol. Make sure you have not become a free advertising billboard by wearing alcohol-imprinted clothing. And most important, clearly tell your children, their friends, and their friends’ parents how you feel about underage drinking.

Kim Johnson directs the Office of Substance Abuse in the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. Resources are available online at www.maine.gov/dhhs/bds/osa.

Please join our weekly conversation about Maine’s substance abuse problem. We welcome comments or questions from all perspectives. Letters may be mailed to Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor 04401. Send e-mail contributions to findingafix@bangordailynews.net. Column editor Meg Haskell may be reached at (207) 990-8291 or mhaskell@bangordailynews.net.