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Show Tesiisifp MiraEiiiiifi Is there a teenager in the house? If so, chances are that A , he or she has at least experimented with drinking some alcoholic beverage. ACCORDING to recent studies for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Wel-fare and the Department of Transportation, half of America's high school students drink once a month or more, and about 61 percent of those young drinkers have been drunk on at least one occasion. Preliminary findings from a 1974 national survey indicate in-dicate that even among seventh graders, 63 percent of boys and 54 percent of girls that had at least one drink. THE PROPORTION of teenage drinkers increased with grade to 93 percent of senior boys and 87 percent of senior girls having had at least one drink. In view of the known importance im-portance of drinking in the American lifestyle, it comes as no surprise that such a vast majority of teenagers have j been introduced to alcohol. TEENAGED drinkers also " have fallen prey. to the same . myths as adult drinkers. For example, although beer is by far the alcoholic beverage teenagers drink most often, many young people do not understand that beer is as intoxicating in-toxicating as distilled spirits. For the average teenager, for example, driving impairment impair-ment occurs after consuming four 12-ounce cans of beer i within a 12-hour period. MANY PARENTS today have a misconception about their children's drinking. i They are often relieved that their teenager is using alcohol rather than another drug. They do not fully realize that alcohol also is a potent drug, and that teenage alcoholism is increasing. ACCORDING TO Dr. Morris Chaftez, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Al-cohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), a part of HEW's Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, Administra-tion, "If you figure that there are 22 million young people in this country between the ages of 12 and 17, and 5 percent get drunk once a week, that's 1,130,000 kids overdosing on alcohol once a week." DRINKING AMONG adolescents is complicated by teenagers' tendencies to socialize in groups, to hang out at school or shopping center parking lots, and to structure their free time around the automobile. The lethal combination of drinking and driving results in 60 percent of traffic fatalities fatali-ties in the 16-24 age group occurring oc-curring under the influence of alcohol. FOR SOME suggestions from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Al-coholism concerning what adults can do to helo teenagers learn responsible drinking habits, see the next column on "Teenage Drinking." |