DRINKING NOT A HARMLESS RITE OF PASSAGE FOR TEENAGERS

A headline in a recent edition of the Journal Star proclaimed: "Study:
Minors consume one-fifth of U.S. booze." The study was conducted on the
drinking habits of more than 216,000 people - 12 and older. According to the
report, one-third of high school students reported they drink to get drunk
at least once a month.

These statistics are not news for those of us who work in substance use
prevention. However, it was startling to learn that high school students who
drink, and their peers who drink occasionally, consume one-fifth of all the
alcohol drunk in this country. Is there any good news?

Yes! The good news is that a majority of teenagers are not drinking, smoking
or using other drugs. A study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse
conducted during spring 2002 on the use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs
(ATOD) by teenagers found that use rates for alcohol "are at record lows in
the history of the survey since 1991." According to the survey, 35 percent
of 10th graders indicated they used alcohol in the month prior - a 6 percent
drop from the 2000 statistics. Tobacco use decreased from 24 percent in 2000
to 17 percent in 2002.

This truth should be shared with parents, community leaders, clergy, police
officers, teachers and, most importantly, among teenagers. It should be
broadcast on television news, depicted in movies and aired on the radio.
Musicians should be singing and rapping about this truth! And a great time
to proclaim this truth is during National Alcohol Awareness Month in April.

A new tool available to us to do this called social marketing. The
foundation and premise of social marketing is the fact that a majority of
our young people are not using ATOD. According to the National Council on
Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, social marketing arms teenagers with this
knowledge and empowers them to have a positive influence on their friends,
and to challenge and change the myth that most people their age drink, smoke
cigarettes or get high on pot.

At a training session I attended, a presenter related to us an example of
how teens frequently over-estimate the actual number of users. She said that
when high school students in a classroom are asked to estimate the
percentage of teens who use ATOD, they nearly always say a majority.
However, she said when those same students are asked that question on an
anonymous survey, a majority report they do not use ATOD. If the majority
are reporting privately that they do not use, why do they respond publicly
that "everyone is doing it"?

Teen drinking is a serious public health challenge. But some people still
minimize the harm that can come to young people from drinking. They believe
it is a rite of passage to adulthood. Social marketing is a tool that can be
used to help them understand that drinking is not inevitable and is not a
harmless rite of passage.

It also can be used to challenge the influences on the youth culture by
television, movies and the advertising industry. These images and
stereotypes have contributed greatly to the mistaken impression that young
people are care-free, drunken "partyers" who engage in a lot of sex. The
prevalence of these images has caused many young people to aspire to be what
they cannot, and in many cases should not, aspire to be. The covert and
overt messages teenagers hear and see are that they will not be accepted by
their peers if they do not drink, smoke, use drugs and engage in casual sex.

Spreading the message that most teens do not use ATOD should not be
construed as a shift away from efforts to educate our young people about the
social, emotional and physical consequences of use. Nor does it signal an
abdication of our responsibility to provide counseling and treatment to
those who do use alcohol and other drugs.

I say this because there are people whose business and livelihood depend on
a never-ending, steady stream of young people who use their products,
whether those products are legal or illegal. So it is important that we
continue to spread the message to teens that using ATODs is unhealthy, not a
normal rite of passage, and that most people their age do not use them.