Kids and Health Care: Drinking and Drugs

There are so many statistics on alcohol and drug use among older children and teens that it's hard to make specific conclusions (that are reliable) from the volume of data.

The best conclusion that you can use is that something like three in 10 kids say they've tried drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana by the time they're 13. And these reported "experiments" don't seem to change much as you look up and down the socio-economic scale. So, even kids from good homes and competitive schools are drinking or smoking.

Without sounding careless about these risks involved with alcohol and drugs, some experimentation with these things is a natural part of adolescence. That doesn't mean every kid does -- or should -- use; it just means that many do.

The challenge for parents is to educate their kids about the risks and health impacts of alcohol and drugs without either seeming to condone their use...or making that use so forbidden that it becomes attractive to a rebellious child.

The problem with young people's experimentation -- especially with drinking -- is that they don't do it in moderation. They do it to get drunk. One study showed the number of young people (this number included teenagers as well as young adults) who said they drink "to get drunk" climbed from 40 percent in 1993 to 48 percent in 2001.

This strategy can cause several problems.

The first: Drunk people do dumb things...including hurting themselves. A 2002 report by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism linked binge drinking to at least 1,400 student deaths and 500,000 injuries a year. Some of these were related to drinking and driving; but most were related to bad choices made at parties or smaller gatherings where the drinking takes place.

The second: Binge drinking is a major health risk. (Forget the "French paradox" and reports that alcohol can be good for your health -- they all relate to moderate drinking. Occasional heavy drinking is clearly bad for you.) Consider these points:

• A light drinker (who quaffs one pint of beer a day) faces a one in 50,000 chance of getting usually fatal cirrhosis of the liver in any single year. Over a drinking lifetime of 50 years, the odds narrow to one in 1,000.
• Heavy drinkers obviously face starker odds. Their odds of dying from the habit are one in 100.
• And both of these projections only calculate disease. They don't count the even greater risk of accidents -- in a car or on foot -- when alcohol is involved.

For most kids, it's enough to emphasize to them that drinking is illegal for people under 18 years old -- and drugs are illegal for almost everyone. The message that they can experiment with alcohol later, when it's legal, is often an effective deterrent.