Unless you’re a parent of a teenager or close to someone who is, you probably have no idea how epidemic teenage drinking has become in our country.   Of the four leading causes of teenage death – automobile accidents, drownings, murders and suicides – alcohol is more than a fifty percent factor.  You could almost say that half of American teen deaths are due to underage drinking.  An alarming statistic to be sure, but just as disturbing is the rise of alcoholism generated by underage drinking.  Statistics show that 40% of people who have their first drink at age 12 or younger will become an alcoholic at some point in their lives.  The average age for the first alcoholic drink is 12 in Texas and a few other states. If teens wait until the ripe old age of 15 for that first taste of alcohol, they are still five times more likely to become an alcoholic than an adult.  In fact, if a person waits until the age of 21, their chances of ever becoming an alcoholic are half of one percent,  From 40% to 0.5% — that is quite a difference.  When you consider that statistic it becomes a mute point to ask if beer and liquor companies target teens — of course they do because that is literally the majority of their future sales.  And how about this statistic — 20% of ALL beer sales are to minors!  That’s one fifth of a beer company’s market.  As anyone who has ever taken a business class knows, no company can afford to lose one fifth of their sales so yes, whether they admit it or not, beer companies target teens.

A few years back a survey discovered that while beer or liquor advertising was only in 20% of general market magazines, such ads as were in virtually 100% of magazines geared to teens!  If you still have doubts about this, just watch any beer company commercial and ask yourself if that commercial would have a strong appeal to a 12-15 year old boy.  Richard Kiel was the actor who portrayed the villain named Jaws in the James Bond movies during the Roger Moore era.  Richard was the huge fellow with the metal teeth in many of those movies.  I knew Richard and he was a kind and gentle Christian man.  One time he was asked by a major beer company to appear in a television commercial.  The idea for the commercial was for Richard to be drinking at a bar when a huge live bull breaks into the place and terrorizes everyone there.  Then Richard would turn around from the bar and growl at the bull, showing the famous Jaws mental teeth, and the bull would turn and run away. It was pretty clever and no doubt would’ve drawn some laugh and probably sold a lot of beer.  As you probably know, beer commercials are usually pretty well done and their Superbowl ads are frequently rated as the most entertaining. But Richard Kiel said no to the beer company.  They doubled their offer.  Richard said no again.  He just didn’t feel right about it.  The beer company doubled their offer yet AGAIN!  Then Richard went to see the Vice President of Marketing for that company and asked him why they wanted him so bad.  According to what he told me he said, “I’m not even a star or a big name.  Why do you want me so bad?”  Well, at that point the executive pointed out that research indicated that Richard’s Jaws character was hugely popular with 12 to 15 year old boys.  Richard got up and walked out.

I had another actor friend who turned down playing the role of a skateboarder in a beer commercial.  He asked the producer why they wanted to show three skateboarders drinking beer when the vast majority of skateboard riders were well until the 21 year old drinking age.  The producer pointed out that the national champion skateboarders were all pretty much in their late 20’s and early 30s.  My actor friend asked if the commercial was being made to target those five guys.  The producer shrugged and my friend left the set.  The primary reason he did this is because he was close to someone who had lost a teenage son to alcohol.  That someone was me.  My much beloved son Jeremiah –who had straight A’s for almost his entire life and was a star in four different sports, who once struck out 17 batters in a six inning minor league game, whose baseball team won the state championship and who personally went to state in three different sports — was killed as a passenger in an accident that involved three drunk drivers.  His mistake was first, going to a high school party where over fifty teenagers were drinking and two, drinking so much himself that he thought it was alright to get a ride home with a friend who was drunk.  They turned in front of a car that was driven by an inebriated man who had several DUIs in the past and, after the crash, they were hit again by a third car driven by someone who was intoxicated.  Jeremiah was greatly mourned with over two thousand people coming to his wake.  To this day, sixteen years later, people still come up to me with stories about how Jeremiah had done something nice for them — stopped people from picking on them, went out of his way to help them or was there for them when no one else seemed to care.  One boy told me that when he and Jeremiah were Freshman they went with a bunch of kids to a pizza place.  There was no alcohol involved – just pizza and pop — but there were some cute girls present.  So, when they left and were walking to their cars, this boy slipped and fell and, as he fell, the only thing he thought about was how everyone was going to make fun of him in front of these girls.  But then Jeremiah did this huge pratfall and everyone made fun of him instead.  The boy that told me the story said that as Jeremiah looked over at him as they were getting up and he knew that Jer had done that for him.  He said, “Jeremiah knew that he could handle the others making fun of him whereas I would have been really embarrassed.”

After Jeremiah’s death I started a non-profit program called Make it Stick to warn teens of the dangers of drinking. Please excuse me for elaborating on such a personal matter in a public forum, but the great tragedy of the teenage drinking problem can not be appreciated unless a bit of the tremendous pain it causes is shared.

Sometimes, when this issue is raised, people point out how teens in Europe have drank wine since they were very young without a great crisis.  My answer is that being raised in a culture where wine is often drank at meals is not the same as being raised in a culture that has adopted being drunk as a natural step towards manhood and a significant act of rebelling from your parents to form your own individual identity.  Sometimes I speak to Junior High students and I tell them that, while they may think they are rebelling when they drink alcohol, they are actually being manipulated by Madison Avenue advertising experts who are targeting them.  Junior High kids think rebellion is cool but being manipulated is not.  Yet another example of alcohol companies targeting teens is the “alcopop” which, fortunately, has now been outlawed in many states.  An alcopop is a flavored alcoholic beverage which is often packaged in a juice box or similar lunch box type container.  I once spoke at a large meeting of education professionals where I distributed various kinds of lunch box drinks and mixed in a few alcopops. I then announced that two of the forty people in the room had an alcoholic drink and asked those with the alcoholic drink to raise their hands.  None of them could do it, because the only way to tell the difference was to read the tiny wording on the ingredients list on the package.  Now, how many 21 year olds would carry an alcopop in their purse?  Not many.  But how many teenage girls would carry one knowing they are not likely to be caught with it?  I don’t have the statistics on this one, but I know the answer is much greater than most people would think.

There are two important contributors to this national tragedy that most people do not know about.  One is the vast amount of parents who grew up in a time where high school kids were occasionally able to obtain alcohol for a few sessions of “road drinking.”  These parents think of teenage drinking as a natural rite of passage – something that happens a few times during the high school years.  They do not realize that today teenage drinking occurs every weekend.  The other serious error that most parents make is thinking that if their child drinks at home, he is safe.  Nearly every teen who drinks at home, drinks away from home whether his or her parents know it or not.  Usually when a parent lets their teenager drink at home he or she will be joined by other teens who, obviously, are not at home.  The sad truth is that most kids get alcohol from the parents of their friends.   Family Photo when Jeremiah was little

As a result of parents underestimating the dangers of teen drinking by comparing it to their own youthful experiences, they tend not to warn their children sufficiently.  A new study out of Seattle confirms that the best way to curb the underage drinking crisis is simply for parents to talk to their kids.  Setting clear rules that prohibit drinking makes a terrific impact.

The finding is based on the survey responses from more than 1,100 U.S. teenagers and young adults in 24 cities in seven states. The participants, who were between 15 and 20 years old, reported their partying behavior, and also whether their families had clear rules against drinking.  “Family rules may be a useful complement to community rules and policies” in the effort to prevent underage drinking, said Mark Wolfson, the study’s lead researcher and a professor of social sciences and health policy at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina.  The researchers found that the teenagers whose parents had clear rules against underage drinking were 35 percent less likely to have attended a party where there was alcohol in the past 30 days, compared with teens whose parents did not have crystal-clear rules.

The Area Music Awards. A Make It Stick Fundraiser

Moreover, the 658 survey participants (about 60 percent) who said they had recently attended parties with alcohol were 38 percent less likely to drink at those parties if their parents had rules against it, compared with kids whose parents didn’t have clear rules, the researchers found. Future research should examine whether parents can be coached in developing effective and appropriate rules for their children, Wolfson said. Most parents do set rules, the study showed: Among the teens in the study, 58 percent reported that their parents had clear rules against drinking, Wolfson found.

It’s important to curb underage drinking for many reasons, including that it’s often associated with risky behaviors, such as drunk driving, interpersonal violence and vandalism, Wolfson said. It can also lead to binge drinking, which is linked with a host of health problems, including liver disease and certain cancers, according to according to a 2012 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The finding, though preliminary, could empower families and ultimately help them shape the healthy development of their children, said Adam Lippert, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver who was not involved in the research.

However, further research should investigate which types of parental rules work best, he said.  For example, it’s unclear whether it’s more effective to have rules that specifically forbid kids from drinking alcohol, or to have more general rules that restrict kids from going to parties or that give them curfews, Lippert said.

The Last Family Photo with Jeremiah 

Moreover, in an email to Live Science, Kenneth Land, a research professor at the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University who was not involved with the research, noted that, “it would be good to have additional data on birth order of the child and a few other items, such as religious affiliation and … perhaps on parents’ own histories of drinking alcohol [and] attending drinking parties when they were teenagers.”

The research had other limitations, too. For example, about 76 percent of the participants were white, so the results may not apply to other groups.  The findings were presented Monday (Aug. 22) at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Seattle. The study has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The good news is that the numbers have been going down a little since the year 2000 when my son was killed.  The bad news is that teens are still dying every day.  Talk to your kids about the dangers.  Talk to them today.

More on this…

The drug talk: 7 new tips for today’s parents

10 facts every parent should know about their teen’s brain

7 ways alcohol affects your health

How 8 common medications interact with alcohol  

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