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Volume 27, Issue 460 |
February 6, 2006 |
FOR SOME YOUNG PEOPLE DRINKING = DEATH
By Christina Kent
For too many college students, campus life includes hangovers, blackouts, academic troubles and even more serious problems caused by drinking. Alcohol is a leading contributor to deaths from injuries – and injuries are the main cause of death for people under age 21, according to the National Institute on Alcohol and Alcoholism.
Studies consistently show that young people aged 18 to 24 are the age group most likely to engage in excessive drinking. About four in five college students drink alcohol, and a large number binge drink (see chart).
“Alcohol use can begin as early as childhood, but typically begins during the teen years, and increases steadily from adolescence into young adulthood, where it reaches its highest lifetime level,” said C. Raymond Bingham, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Medicine.
As a consequence:
- Some 1,700 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die each year from alcohol-related unintentional injuries, including motor vehicle crashes;
- 696,000 are assaulted by other students who have been drinking; and
- 97,000 are victims of alcohol-related sexual assault.
A striking number of students report having alcohol-induced memory blackouts: one study found that among nonabstaining college students, 40 percent reported having a blackout within the past year, and 9.4 percent said they’d had one within the past two weeks.
The media tends to focus on college students. But because there are far more non-college students aged 18 to 24 than there are college students, non-college students account for more alcohol-related problems than do college kids.
Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility, from the National Academy of Sciences, suggests a number of actions that states can take to curb underage drinking. Examples include regulating Internet sales and home delivery of alcohol to reduce the likelihood of sales to underage purchasers, and enacting and enforcing laws that hold retailers responsible (as a condition of licensing) for allowing minors to loiter and solicit adults to buy alcohol for them.
In New York, the Legislature is considering SB 1618, which would increase beer excise taxes on distributors and noncommercial importers to 23.2 centers per gallon of beer, and use all of the proceeds to create a substance abuse services fund. Legislators found that the largely unmet demand for substance abuse services is due primarily to inadequate funding, and that for every increase in the price of alcohol, there is an associated decrease in consumption. Moreover, increases in alcohol excise taxes lower rates of traffic fatalities, the annual cost of treating alcohol-related diseases, the number of binge-drinking episodes and the probability of alcohol-related violence.
In New Mexico, the Legislature is weighing SB 27, which would appropriate $917,000 from the general fund to the higher education department over FYs 2007-2008 to pay for behavioral health programs in community colleges and on university campuses, including suicide interventions and binge-drinking prevention education and services.
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