The Truth about Teen Drinking

Though no one disputes the fact that Paul Welby’s parents served the champagne the night of the accident that left sixteen-year-old Danny Foley in a coma from which he’s not expected to recover, other points are less clear. For instance, did Paul’s parents realize the boys were refilling their glasses on their own when the parents weren’t in the room? Did they know that Paul, who is seventeen, planned to drive their car to a graduation party later that night? What if it was the panic of being pursued by a state trooper that caused Paul to lose control of the car and slam into a telephone pole?

“Was it only the alcohol that caused the crash that night?” one of the Welbys’ attorneys pointedly asks the jury.

The facts in the case of Foley v. Welby give it the ripped-from-the-headlines feel of an episode of Law & Order—though the acting in this courtroom drama isn’t quite ready for prime time. The lawyers tug at their T-shirts while delivering their closing arguments. The judge forgets her lines. An emotional outburst from one of the spectators draws giggles instead of gasps. Fortunately, health teacher Kari Slade isn’t grading her students at Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School on their performances, but rather on their grasp of the legal consequences of underage drinking.

Today’s mock trial is part of Class Action, a health curriculum developed by experts at Hazelden, the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota State Bar Association that’s now taught in all Minneapolis public high schools. Instead of lectures on impaired judgment and long-term liver damage associated with alcohol use, Class Action concentrates on the legal consequences of underage drinking, asking students to prosecute, defend, and decide the outcome of a series of fictional but true-to-life cases that center on teens and liquor.

In Foley v. Welby, students are examining the legal precedent that gives parents some discretion when it comes to sharing alcohol with children in their home. They also are learning about the Minnesota statute that makes furnishing alcohol to minors a gross misdemeanor. Did the Welbys break the law? The victim in this case, Danny Foley, knew he couldn’t drink legally, but did so anyway, then climbed into a car with an underage friend who’d been drinking too. So what part did Danny’s decisions play in what happened that night?

These are questions the Roosevelt High jury will have to decide—and fast. The third-period bell will ring in less than five minutes.

While the jury deliberates, let’s review the facts about youth alcohol use in Minnesota—an issue as troubling to parents as it is to public health and safety officials. Though surveys continue to show a downward trend in illicit drug use among teens and a 40 percent drop in alcohol use among eighth graders since a peak in the mid-1990s, the experts say what’s happening in real life isn’t nearly as reassuring as the numbers might suggest.

“Today’s baby boomer parents might remember a time when a certain a-mount of drinking was a rite of passage, but things are different now,” says Jim Steinhagen, executive director of Hazelden’s Center for Youth and Families in Plymouth. “There’s a kind of drinking to the extreme, like the X Games in sports, pushing it right to the edge.”

And sometimes beyond. Headlines about the twenty-one-year-old woman who died in Mankato following a birthday binge that drove her blood-alcohol content to more than five times the legal driving limit shocked parents and pundits alike last fall. But what happened to Amanda Jax was no surprise to police, who know too well the popularity of so-called “power hours,” where newly minted twenty-one-year-olds do their best to down an equal number of shots between midnight and closing time.