WHY BOOZE PUSHERS ARE LOSING SLEEP

Health may be a key reason

BERKELEY Heavy drinking by white men has plunged dramatically in the
last decade, apparently because of new concerns about health, a University
of California, Berkeley alcohol research team says.

The number of white male heavy drinkers those who consume five drinks or
more in a single sitting at least once a week dropped from 20 percent in a
1984 survey to 12 percent in 1995.

An equally startling discovery shows that while heavy drinking among
AfricanAmerican and Latino men has remained constant, a growing percentage
of minority men and women of all ages have quit using alcohol entirely.
Fully 55 percent of AfricanAmerican women and 57 percent of Latina woman
do not drink at all.

Among AfricanAmerican men, 36 percent don't drink, up from 29 percent in
1984, the study found. Among Latino men, 35 percent no longer drink, up
from 22 percent from a decade earlier.

Abstinence by whites has increased, but only slightly 39 percent of
women and 26 percent of men the researchers said in a report presented
Monday at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in
Indianapolis, Ind.

Percapita consumption of alcohol, especially high alcohol spirits such as
whiskey and vodka, has been dropping since the early 1980s, said study
arthors Raul Caetano, director of the Alcohol Research Group at UC
Berkeley's School of Public Health, and Katherine Clark.

The study of 6,000 Americans across the nation in 1984 and again in 1995
is the first to track drinking by ethnic background. However, drinking
statistics for Americans of Asian and American Indian descent were not
reported.

Reasons for the changes aren't clear, Caetano said in an interview
Tuesday. "There's no hard evidence, but people are exercising more. People
are drinking bottled water and juice. There are juice bars everywhere.

"We speculate that maybe the majority population has also become a little
more conscious of the harm of excessive alcohol consumption," Caetano said.
"There's been an ongoing prevention effort. Also the legal drinking age has
changed from 18 to 21 and that has had an impact."

He suggested that drinking patterns are duplicating are smoking less, but
others are not. A switch to drugs from alcohol is more prevalent in high
school than among those of legal drinking age, be said.

Although deadly binge drinking on college campuses has been in the news
recently, the study dealt primarily with frequent, heavy drinkers
someone who has five or more drinks in one sitting at least once a week
and more moderate users.

The study indicates that in many ways, Americans of different ethnic
backgrounds still live in widely different societies, he said.

Among white males 50 to 59, frequent, heavy drinking consumption of more
than five drinks at one sitting at least once a week plunged to 3 percent
from 19 percent in 1984.

Among white males 18 to 29, heavy drinking sank to 16 percent from 32
percent in 1984. Heavy drinking by AfricanAmerican males stayed the same
15 percent. And among Latinos, the percentage rose a point to 18 percent.
There was a 5 percent drop to 16 percent among African American men 50 to
59, but a constant 16 percent of Latino men of that age continued to drink
heavily.