Parents, community often don’t take problem of teenage drinking seriously

When Trish was in high school, she never touched a drop of alcohol.

It didn’t interest her.

So it’s hard to understand how, a year after graduating, alcohol would bring her to within feet of crashing a car through a house and land her in jail.

“I knew my life was really messed up,” she said.

Trish, who asked that her real name be withheld to protect her identity, needed to come to terms with the fact that she was one of thousands of underage drinkers who end up injured, dead or in jail each year.

Many experts believe it’s not only young people who don’t see the problem – parents and members of the community don’t take underage and excessive drinking seriously enough.

“As a society, we’ve got to do a far better job persuading our citizens and our young people that alcohol use in a dead end, that they are playing Russian roulette, not only with their own lives but with the lives of friends, neighbors and loved ones,” said Stacia Murphy, president of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

This year, hundreds of communities are targeting underage drinking during April, which is Alcohol Awareness Month.

“In past years, they have focused on the children or teenagers, this year they are taking on the entire community,” said Michele Moore, prevention coordinator for the Mental Health Center of North Central Alabama, which is leading the effort in Limestone, Morgan and Lawrence counties.

Organizers are putting up billboards in the communities, making pre-prom posters and underage drinking posters for the schools, as well as other projects, Moore said.

The upcoming spring break – a week notorious for high school and college binge drinking and all that goes with it – is a good time to start talking about the problem.


Trish’s story

Trish was an athlete in high school and never considered drinking.

“I played basketball, track and golf and I was really competitive,” she said. “My parents drank and so did their friends, but I didn’t see much point in it.”

Trish earned a basketball scholarship for her freshman year at college. It didn’t take her long to see that while she was a standout player in high school, she wasn’t going to be one in college. Still, she met a lot of friends at school and they began partying on Saturday nights. The weekend partying stretched into weeknights.

Her grades steadily declined and she was eventually cut from the team.

One night after getting drunk at a party, Trish headed for another party to meet some friends at about 1 a.m. in the car her parents bought her.

“I don’t really remember why I lost control,” Trish said. “I told the police and my parents that I had a blow out.”

A chain-link fence stopped her car about 20 feet from of a house.

“I just freaked,” Trish said. “I didn’t know what to do. I knew I was drunk. I got out of the car and ran home. I took a shower and called some guys I knew to try to help me get the car moved. When I heard a knock on the door, I thought it was them, so I opened it. It was the police.”

Trish was charged with driving under the influence and reckless driving and she had to pay for the fence she damaged. At the suggestion of her parents, she dropped out of school and went home. She started going to Alcoholics Anonymous, but for the wrong reason.

“I mainly did it because my lawyer said it might help when I was sentenced,” she said. “But, I ended up staying.”

She’s enrolled in courses at a North Alabama college, getting decent grades and not drinking.

“The first time I went to college, I wanted to be a teacher and a coach, but I don’t know if I can really do that now (because of her police record),” she said.

Now 21 and legally able to drink in Alabama, Trish did not foresee the dangers of underage and excessive drinking. Her parents didn’t see it either. Both of them drank, often too much, while entertaining friends at home, Trish said.

“I never thought about it becoming a problem,” she said.

To some parents, the thought of teenagers drinking a beer with friends isn’t that alarming — especially when their teenager is in college. Some parents who drank when they were young view it as a right of passage into adulthood.

What they probably don’t know is that drinking alcohol greatly increases the chance that a teen or young adult will be the victim of a car crash, homicide or suicide – the leading causes of death for their age group, experts say.



Spring break

That teenagers require a strict no-use policy and tighter supervision became clearer to many parents in 2005.

On May 30, an 18-year-old high school senior from Mountain Brook, an affluent suburb of Birmingham, disappeared while on a senior class trip to Aruba. Natalee Holloway has never been found. Authorities say she is most likely dead.

After a night of excessive drinking, she was last seen leaving a bar about 1 a.m. in a car with three young men. Some theorize she was raped, murdered and her body disposed of while others believe she died of alcohol poisoning and her body was disposed of.

Whether it is class trip, prom night or spring break, teenagers need to know that drinking isn’t the only way to have fun, said Randy Haveson, nationally renowned alcohol and drug counselor who has appeared on CNN, FOX News Channel and numerous shows across the country.

“There are alternative spring-break functions going on at more and more colleges across the nation,” he said. “Many sororities and fraternities are jumping on the bandwagon. Delta Zeta has a national campaign to go to the Gulf for a week and help build houses for people whose houses were destroyed in the hurricane. The students pay $250 bucks to attend and they live in dorms or in tents for a week. They meet people and have a great time, without drinking.”

Haveson, 47, of Atlanta is a therapist and a recovering alcoholic and drug addict from Atlanta, who uses what he’s learned to try to teach others.

“I started drinking and smoked my first joint when I was 15,” he said. “At 17, I had my first cocaine and I did a lot of drugs in between there. When I was 24, I had just gotten a letter from San Diego State University expelling me for the second time and two weeks before that I had lost my pizza delivery job. I wondered how did it get here. I was trying to decide, do I want to slit my wrist or my throat? I reached out for help and started turning things around. I got bachelor’s degree and my masters and stayed sober. Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way.”



News for students

Today, Haveson speaks to students in elementary schools, high schools, and colleges and to parents and other groups nationwide.

“The main message I teach is that you are a product of the choices you make,” Haveson said. “I talk about my own addiction and how it started with one then two then five and quickly it got out of hand. No one taught me how to make good decisions.”

He also tells students about tolerance, progression and blackouts and other medical aspects of drinking along with the warning signs of addiction.

“I ask how many of them like roller coasters, and a bunch of them will raise their hands,” Haveson said. “I ask them if they would like to go on a great rollercoaster with lost of curves and dips, and a bunch of them will raise their hands. Then I tell them that 1,700 die a year on the rollercoaster but it’s great, it’s so much fun, and 250,000 get injured, sometimes they just break a bone or crack their head open, but sometimes they end up in a wheelchair. Then I ask them, ‘Do you still want to get on the rollercoaster?’”

He doesn’t just tell students to say no. He teaches students how to say no – no matter what age. If they want to drink, he teaches them how to drink responsibly with a program called Party with a Plan, an alcohol education, risk-reduction program using his 0-1-2-3 guideline.

“It means sometimes 0 is best option if haven’t eaten or you have been sick or you are under 21,” Haveson said. “I tell them if they are under 21, drinking is not a good idea because if they get pulled over and blow a .02 (in a police breath test), they get a DUI. If they want to be a teacher or a coach or a lawyer within the next 10 years, they can forget it.

“If they decide to drink, then it should only be 1 per hour and they should drink no more than 2 times per week. That’s because three or more times a week can lead to addiction.”

Telling children or teenagers to “just say no” doesn’t work for many, he said.

“When someone sticks a joint in their face, they have to know how to say no. For example, you could teach them to say, ‘I’ve got to go out to dinner with my parents tonight and they’d notice if I was high.’ It gets them out of the situation,” Haveson said.

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