Teenage drinking – not so fun anymore

Preferring soccer to shots, I was 19 before I got wall- eyed, room-spinning, disgusted-girlfriend-haul-you-home-by-your-nostrils drunk for the first time. By contemporary standards that makes me a late bloomer; a recent survey found one-third of American high school seniors had been drunk within the last month, perhaps occasionally in the company of the 8 percent of eighth-graders who also reported being drunk in the last month.

The pervasive use of alcohol by American teens, and growing evidence that alcohol use is much more harmful to teens than we thought, is stripping the charm off teenage drinking. The facts are sobering:

. new medical evidence suggests that alcohol can damage the teenage brain until it stops developing in its early 20s;

. one-third of fourth-graders and one-half of sixth-graders say they have been pressured by a peer within the last month to drink alcohol;

. proving peer pressure works, 25 percent of eighth-graders report drinking alcohol, and 8 percent report being drunk, within the last month;

. proving you don’t necessarily smarten up in high school, 53 percent of high school seniors report drinking alcohol, and 34 percent report being drunk, within the last month;

. 40 percent of teenagers who drink repeatedly before the age of 15 will become actively addicted to alcohol – alcoholics – at some point in their lifetime. In terms of future health, that makes drinking alcohol regularly before the age of 15 like getting leukemia;

. alcohol is a major contributor to the three leading causes of death among teenagers – car crashes, suicide and homicide – and a contributing factor in half of teenage sexual assaults;

. surveys suggest European teens are more likely than American teens to abuse alcohol. The fact they drink more than American teens and get drunk more often suggests our belief that social drinking during their teens teaches Europeans to drink more appropriately than Americans do is a myth;

. teenagers are more likely to drink alcohol than smoke cigarettes or use drugs;

. teenage drinking costs this society an estimated $53 billion a year.

It’s all enough to take the bubbles out of a boatload of Beck’s Beer, and to raise real questions about the wisdom of our common practice of “teaching teenagers to drink responsibly” by teaching them to drink under our guidance during their teenage years. Perhaps we should be teaching them instead not to drink at all until they are at least 21, because drinking before that fails to walk a straight line of science or law. Drinking before 21, even under the watchful eyes of parents, is not legal, has not been shown to be safe in the short or long term, and may increase the risk of binge and other risky drinking among teens.

All of that in turn causes a lot of mayhem, in teenage brains, teenage lives and in our society. In other words, maybe it is not “just a beer” when our teenagers are drinking it.

It’s tempting to think that teenage drinking is just a problem in the homes of other parents, but the evidence is the problem kids are our kids. More than half of our teenagers have been drinking in the last month, but most parents do not think their kids have been drinking in the last month.

Two-thirds of adolescents say home is the easiest place for them to get booze. The problem of teenage drinking is as pervasive as, well, teenagers. In fact, the only way for a parent to be sure they don’t have a teenage drinking problem in the home is to send all of the teenagers there to college.

It is also tempting to say that addressing the problem of drinking teenagers is the responsibility of the involved parents. That’s social OUI – there is no addressing teenage drinking without addressing it as a society’s, and a community’s, problem.

If we want sober teens less likely to be hooked on, killed by, brain-injured by, date-raped in part as the result of, America’s favorite drug, we need to treat the problem as our collective problem to be solved.

To that end, there is a lot to be done. First, we need to pull our heads out of our Buds, wake up to a problem staring at us across the breakfast table every morning and talk to our children about teenage drinking. We need to tell them it’s not a good thing, that not every kid is doing it and you want yours not to.

Second, when our teens are going out we need to ask with whom, where to, what adult will be there, and make sure our teens are not being allowed to drink at parent-chaperoned parties.

Third, we need to pour our blas? attitude about our drinking and our teens’ drinking down the drain.

For those in the Bangor area interested in doing more, an informational evening presentation on the topic is planned from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. June 1 at Husson College. For more information call 941-2800.

Finally, we need to look ourselves in the mirror of parenting and stare the real problem in the face. We raise the children we have, and every time one of them falls down drunk it’s because the rest of us fell down on the job of keeping them away from booze until it’s really safe for them to drink.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.