NEWS FOCUS ON BUSH GIRLS GLOSSES OVER SERIOUS ISSUE

President Bush may have had his twin daughters in mind when he told a
"Summit on Fatherhood'' June 7: "Raising a child requires sacrifice,
effort, time and presence. And there is a wide gap between our best
intentions and the reality of today's society.''

Ever since Bush's daughters, Jenna and Barbara, were charged last month
with alcohol-related offenses -- Jenna for the second time -- the most
disconcerting reaction has been the coverage and the commentary. The
Saturday and Sunday talk shows saw the events as an opportunity to share
frat-house war stories about the drunken good old days. Columnists tended
to focus on whether the matter was public or private, or even worthy of notice.

Missed in all this yak-yak is the seriousness of alcohol abuse and the
possibility that one or both of the president's daughters has a problem.

When Bush, as governor of Texas in 1997, signed the zero-tolerance law
banning underage drinking, his state had a problem. It still does.

At the time Bush acted, Texas led the nation in the number of
alcohol-related traffic deaths among the nation's youth. In 1999, the Texas
Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse released a study of drinking by
university students showing that three of 10 students were binge drinkers,
with the rate as high as 44 percent for members of sororities and
fraternities. Binge drinking is defined as consuming five or more drinks at
a sitting for a man, or four or more drinks at a sitting for a woman, on at
least two occasions a month.

The commission's data showed that 28 percent of the students drove cars
after drinking, and that 10 percent drove after having five drinks.

Texas takes the illness of alcoholism seriously, even if the nation's
best-paid pundits do not. The Texas commission tracks binge drinking as it
does the use of crack cocaine, PCP or the drug ecstasy. All of these
chemical substances, from wine coolers to heroin, are stacked in the same
tables issued by Texas to show what people were using when they stumbled
into the state's treatment centers, desperate for help.

In 1999, the Texas centers had 40,439 admissions. More than a third, 35.4
percent, were for alcohol abuse. Crack cocaine came in second, with 26.2
percent of the admissions. Heroin came in third, with 12.5 percent of the
patients.

National studies conducted by Harvard show that college students are far
more likely to binge than non-students, and that frequency of binge
drinking is steadily increasing. Students who told Harvard's School of
Public Health they binged three or more times in a two-week period went
from 19.8 percent of the entire sample in 1993, to 20.9 percent in 1997 and
22.7 percent in 1999.

More female students are getting plastered more frequently than before. Is
it possible that the daughters of a president risked arrest -- under a law
their father signed -- on a lark? Or was something even more serious than
law-breaking by the Bush family involved? If so, then the Bush girls
represent the one in four of our daughters in the nation's colleges, or
29.3 percent of college men, who reported being "drunk three or more times
in the last month.''

Frequent binge drinkers are 17 times as likely to miss class, 10 times as
likely to vandalize their dorms or other property and eight times as likely
to get hurt in an accident or a fight.

Studies at Harvard and by the National Institutes of Health indicate campus
boozers are much more likely to engage in unprotected sex. For women, being
drunk increases the risk of sexual assault or date rape.

Alcohol, the Harvard report said, was a factor in 66 percent of student
suicides and 60 percent of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

Those families afflicted with alcoholism over many generations know that
the disease, whether induced by an environment like college, or passed on
genetically, thrives in an atmosphere of denial.

So the media's recounting of youthful foibles and speculations about
presidential privacy are, in their own way, a national exercise in denial
about the nation's most costly and prevalent disease.

DOUGLAS TURNER is the Washington bureau chief of the Buffalo News, where
this article appeared.