Youth Drinking Stabilizes, But at High Levels

A new analysis of youth drinking trends finds relatively stable prevalence rates for underage drinking, but the levels still remain high, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) reported Sept. 14. For the study, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) looked at youth-drinking data collected in three surveys: Monitoring the Future, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). The research found that underage drinking rates peaked in the late 1970s, when 80 percent of adolescents said they consumed alcohol by the time they were 12th graders, and 12 percent of 8th-graders said they consumed five or more drinks on a single occasion within the two weeks prior to being surveyed. In the 1980s, when the minimum legal drinking age rose from 18 to 21, youth drinking rates declined. Since the early 1990s, underage drinking rates have stabilized, but at levels that experts describe as disturbing. "Stable is better than up," said NIAAA researcher Vivian Faden, Ph.D., a co-author of the study. "However, the current stability in youth-drinking prevalence is quite worrisome." Currently, rates for any alcohol use in the past 30 days range from 19.6 percent of 8th-graders to 48.6 percent of 12th-graders. The research also shows that more than 12 percent of 8th-graders and nearly 30 percent of 12th-graders reported drinking five or more drinks in a row in the past two weeks. "Much remains to be done to get those numbers moving down again," said Faden. "We need to re-examine the approaches we have taken to prevent underage drinking, so that in another 10 years we can report a downturn in this high-prevalence behavior instead of a stable situation." The study's findings are published in the September 2004 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.