Binge-Drinking College Students and Teens

So maybe I had a completely unique adolescence and undergrad experience, but I’m just sitting here shaking my head at some of the “news” that’s recently been released about the drinking habits of young people in their teens and twenties.

Over at iVillage, the article “Binge Drinking Rampant Among College Students: Liquor also linked to other risky behaviors, poorer school scores, CDC report finds” says,

“Our study clearly shows that it’s not just that students drink alcohol, but how much they drink that most strongly affects whether they experience other health and social problems,” said lead author Jacqueline Miller, medical officer on the CDC’s Alcohol Team, in a prepared statement. “It also underscores the importance of implementing effective strategies to prevent underage and binge drinking, such as enforcing the minimum legal drinking age and reducing alcohol marketing to youth, which can help us change social norms regarding the acceptability of underage and binge drinking.”

Well, jeez, guys, I coulda told you that — and I would have done it for free!

And then there’s this one, “Teen Binge Drinking: Common and Risky” from WebMD, which says,

Almost two-thirds of high school students who drink alcohol admit binge drinking and may be at risk of other serious health problems, says the CDC.
…
Some students may have been reluctant to report underage drinking, so the estimates may be too low, [the research] team notes.

Um, duh?

Okay, so let’s do a quick review of the information we have here. The CDC did a study of teen drinking in 2003. It took them four years to collect, analyze, and interpret the data, which, not surprisingly, indicate that yes, teenagers drink, and yes, they’re susceptible to the same health issues as anyone else who overconsumes.

This is not new information, folks. So what are we going to do about it?

Well, one group of researchers from the University of Virginia Health System seem to have found one answer, as reported in the article “Interviewing Technique Reduces Risk For Binge Drinking, Unplanned Pregnancies” over at ScienceDaily:

…just a few targeted counseling sessions had a notably positive impact on women at high risk for binge drinking, unplanned pregnancy, and exposure to alcohol during pregnancy. The counseling technique, called motivational interviewing (MI), has proven effective after just four counseling sessions.
…
“We demonstrated that using motivational counseling can have a major impact, even on behaviors that are considered difficult to change, such as binge drinking,” Ingersoll [the lead researcher] said. “While our main goal was to reduce the risk of alcohol-exposed pregnancy, ours was the first multi-site study to show that motivational counseling can be effective when targeting more than one health behavior, in this case, both drinking and contraception habits, among women who were not seeking help to change.”

Now that is useful information! So what’s up with the Centers for Obvious Research — oops, I mean Centers for Disease Control? Did they genuinely doubt that there are alcohol issues among today’s youth, or think that perhaps anyone under the age of 30 would be somehow immune to the negative effects of drinking too much? I mean, really, people, get a clue. It’s a problem. Now about about trying to solve it instead of just collecting more data that reveal the same information we already have and have had for ages?

What do you think?