Teen-agers drinking alcohol isn't much of a problem in Italy or France or in other Mediterranean countries. Oh, they do drink; it's just not a major problem like it is in the United States.
The U.S. has a problem with teen-age drunk-driving slaughter, many experts believe, because Americans seem unable to teach moderation and responsible use to their children. Like so many things, most Americans see drinking as all-or-nothing, good- versus-bad, black-or-white, yes-or-no and no "maybe" allowed.
Teaching youth about drinking alcohol is a lot like teaching them about sex. In America many people feel that teaching kids about sex is the same as teaching them to have sex; that showing them which end of a condom to use is the same as urging them to use it. U.S. government policy and most cultural mores urge a "Just Say No" attitude to both sex and alcohol. As a result, American kids are naive and ignorant about sex and alcohol -- which together often produce their own spontaneous combustion. It should come as no surprise that the United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the Western world along with the highest teen AIDS population as well as more teen-agers who are killed and maimed by alcohol.
Most French and Mediterranean youngsters grow up with wine on the dinner table and are introduced to small amounts of it (diluted with water) frequently by the age of 10. As Dr. Wells Shoemaker puts it, he found that in that part of the world, wine is "a matter-of-fact, pleasant, unpretentious part of the evening meal. It wasn't a `score' that I had to make with a fake ID in a liquor store. It wasn't a sexual thrill, and it wasn't a macho overture. It was supper."
There is much support for the premise that parents who teach their children about alcohol in the home, and teach them pragmatically about moderation and responsibility, will dramatically decrease the risk of abuse outside the home -- along with the sometimes tragic consequences that result.
"Many who have studied the etiology [course of development] of alcoholism, believe that the complete prohibition of exposure to alcoholic beverages until `adulthood' is not an appropriate way of preventing alcohol abuse," wrote Dr. Curtis Ellison, M.D., in his editorial in the September 1990 issue of the medical journal, Epidemiology.
"We expect to raise these people [children] to the age of 21, open the door and say, `Now drink; it will be fine dear.' And of course, we know how badly that has failed," said Dr. Margaret Deansley, M.D., a practicing physician affiliated with the Stanford Medical School and a widely known lecturer on both alcohol abuse and breast cancer. "So, I am very much an advocate of making it [education in responsible drinking] an acceptable part of the home curriculum, and if necessary, the school's," she continued.
But because the official U.S. government alcohol policy is abstinence, voices like those of Drs. Deansley, Ellison and Shoemaker and even research studies which do not concur with the official position find no recognition within the agencies.
One such report was a 1986 study, The Minimum Legal Drinking Age and Traffic Fatalities, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). That report concluded, "Our findings with respect to the minimum legal drinking age and drinking experience are not happy ones for public officials. It does not appear that the high fatality risk presented by new drinkers can be ameliorated by raising the legal drinking age.... The problem arises not because we permit people to drink when they are `too young,' but rather because we permit them to experience the novelty of `new drinking' at a time when they are legally able to drive. If drinking experience preceded legal driving, a potentially important lifesaving gain might follow."
The authors were correct that their findings were not happy ones for public officials; theirs, and other studies which have reached similar conclusions, conflict with official policy and have been both ignored and suppressed by NIAAA and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Researchers, who are funded by such very politicized agencies as NIAAA, and even some units of the National Institutes of Health, learn very quickly that their study grants dry up when they produce conclusions that conflict with official policy.
But not every agency in the federal government has ignored studies that run counter to the "no-use, just-say-no" policy on alcohol. This policy was blasted in 1991 by the General Accounting Office (GAO) which serves as an investigation arm of Congress. The GAO issued a report critical of the HHS, the Department of Education and HHS's Office for Substance Abuse and Prevention (OSAP).
The GAO study said that the no-use policy of those agencies does not work and further that their deliberate linkng of alcohol with illegal drugs in order to make alcohol look bad was "unacceptable" and perhaps counterproductive and detrimental.
Instead, the GAO report urged more emphasis on responsible decision-making approaches in order to decrease risky behavior, not only for teen-agers but for all Americans.
Government agencies and private advocacy groups regularly issue news releases and hold seminars on how the teen drinking problem is getting worse and worse and why they need ever-increasing funding to fight the growing menace.
But government statistics themselves show that the situation is getting better, not worse. Some examples:
-- A survey conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) shows that from 1979 to 1990, the proportion of 12- to 17-year-olds who ever drank alcohol declined by 31 percent and that from 1982 to 1990, the proportion of 18- to 25-year-olds who reported ever having consumed alcohol dropped by 17.4 percent.
-- Binge drinking (defined as five or more drinks at a single drinking session) declined 21.8 percent from 1980 to 1990 according to a study conducted by NIDA along with the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.
This is not to say, in any way, that abuse among American youth can be ignored. It does say that government agencies and advocacy groups, whose financial funding and jobs depend on the continuation of a serious problem, will sometimes distort the truth.
The job then falls to parents to level with their children, tell them the truth about alcohol's dangers and its potential for the social and health benefits which can come from responsible, moderate consumption.
Dr. Deansley said that her approach to teaching her children about alcohol was much the same as she used in teaching them how to decrease other risky behaviors.
In her own words: "I raised my children in the typical fashion, and that is to say that when they were in diapers, they were in the backyard with me. When they could understand me and could be with me by the hand, they could be in the front yard and when they were older they were allowed to go as far as the front gate but not out into the street.
"When they started going to school, there were very careful arrangements for their passing down the street and there was a crossing guard to help them to the safety of the schoolyard to protect them from traffic. As they grew older, they went to driver's training and they drove with a parent for a measured period of time prescribed by law and they took a test prior to doing that and then I kept my eye on the odometer and knew whether the car which we had allowed them to use had in fact just gone down the street to meet friends for a hamgurner or in fact had disappeared twenty miles and had come back in rather record time because it had to be accomplished during the time allotted for a hamburger.
"That I am saying is that I taught my children about behaviors which might have risks in a graded fashion. These are typical teaching patterns of families against potential risk behaviors. Unfortunately, these are not patterns which are advocated, offered, sanctioned or are socially acceptable when it comes to alcohol consumption in our society, presently."
Deansley said parents need to teach their children about alcohol in the same graduated way that they ought to with other behaviors which involve a degree of risk.