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Sunday, June 4, 2000

In the San Dieguito Union High School District, which serves 5,600 high schoolers from Carlsbad to Del Mar, 70 percent of the students in grades 9 through 12 reported having had alcohol at least once in their lifetime. Of these, 50 percent, or 1,960, reported having had an episode of heavy drinking—five or more drinks on one occasion—in the last 30 days, said Sandra Brown, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at UC San Diego, who surveyed the students’ drinking habits last fall.

For Wendy Colin, a 19-year-old from Escondido, a jaunt to Tijuana’s bars ended in tragedy. As she and four other young women were driving home at dawn after a night of drinking March 14, 1999, their van rolled over several times near Kearny Villa road. Colin was killed. The driver, Yhaskara Vivian Nichols, 19, was convicted of vehicular manslaughter and drunk driving. She was sentenced to two years in prison.

Experts are not certain why teen drinking is on the rise, but theories abound. More permissive parental attitudes, greater affluence and ease of access for area youths are all cited by some observers.

"I think our community is more accepting in terms of providing alcohol at their homes. I’ve never seen so permissive of an environment," said Torrey Pines High Principal Marie Grey.

Even for teens with stricter parents, alcohol is often easy to get. Fake identification cards are plentiful. A recent survey conducted by the student newspaper at Torrey Pines High School revealed that one in five of the 260 students surveyed owns a fake ID.

"It is startling that so many young people are able to obtain alcoholic

Many of the fake IDs are of excellent quality and even when youths use their real IDs some clerks are unable to compute the age from the birth date to determine whether or not they are of age, she said.

Periodic stings conducted by the Sheriff’s Department continue to turn up area establishments that illegally provide alcohol to minors.

Although enforcement has reduced the number of sales to youths over the years, "shoulder taps"—youths getting adults to buy for them—are still quite common, Corona said.

Twenty-five years ago, the average shoulder tapper was 18 or 19, Corona said. "Now we have them as young as 12 trying to buy alcohol."

Seeking oblivion

Some teens say they drink to excess to escape from their problems.

"If I’m in a pissed-off mood, I drink to get drunk," said a gangly, 15-year-old boy from the San Dieguito Academy as he sat on his bike and smoked a cigarette outside a convenience store near the school.

For a 17-year-old girl from Rancho Santa Fe, binge drinking "means being impaired—you’re not functioning."

Getting "as drunk as humanly possible" in Tijuana nightclubs began at age 15 for a girl from Sunset High School in Encinitas. On some occasions, she awoke at 5 a.m. with her head on a toilet after a night of swilling tequila and beer, she said.

The media, Internet influence

"What has changed is the perception fostered by the media about the acceptability of excessive drinking," said UCSD’s Brown, who delved into the

And the Internet is also becoming part of the problem.

"The alcohol industry is making greater efforts to appeal to pre-teens on the Internet by using colors, designs, and games found to appeal to that age range to normalize alcohol," Brown said.

Her conclusions about the media are reinforced by a recent study by Stanford University’s departments of pediatrics and communications. Teens who watch more television, particularly music videos, are more likely to drink, the study found.

The survey of 2,777 ninth-graders, most of them 14 years old, determined that each hour of daily television viewing increases by 9 percent a teen’s likelihood of drinking in the next 18 months.

Television and music videos often portray attractive, successful people consuming alcohol with no negative consequences, and that induces teens to drink, the study states. However, playing computer and video games did not increase the likelihood of alcohol use because alcohol is not prevalent in the games, the study found.

Forbidden fruit

While most of the North County educators and parents interviewed for this story advocate abstinence from alcohol as the best solution, this may not be the best way to reduce irresponsible drinking by teens, one expert says.

Trying to keep young people from drinking is precisely what makes it more appealing to them, said Ruth Engs, a professor at Indiana University who studies teen drinking.

Although the rate of adolescent drunken driving has dropped nationally since most states raised their drinking ages to 21 in the 1980s, thinks like vomiting, hangovers, missing class or getting into trouble with the law due to drinking have all gone up, she said.

"It’s causing a backlash because it’s a forbidden fruit," Engs said. "If you tell people they can’t do something they feel they are entitled to do, they are going to do it anyway and they are going to do it in excess."

Engs said adolescents should be allowed to drink at restaurants with their parents, at supervised parties on college campuses, or in

A full-court press needed

"We should leave (the legal drinking age) at 21," said San Diego County Assistant Sheriff Tom Zoll, who supervises the department’s Law Enforcement Services Bureau. "A lot of 18-year-olds are not mature enough to make that decision."

To deal with the problem of teen drinking, Zoll recommends intensifying whatever will help break down the peer pressure that is leading many teens to drink and drink to excess.

"Parents need to know if their kids are coming home drunk. Schools need to continue reinforcing the fact that this is bad," Zoll said. "We need a full-court press to get out the message that this is not good and why."