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.

“Parents don’t understand the kind of drinking that’s going on,” says Gordy Pehrson, a traffic safety coordinator at the Minnesota Office of Traffic Safety. “It’s less of an exercise in socializing and more about drinking a lot of hard liquor in a short amount of time.”

It’s not just birthdays that bring out this kind of dangerous behavior. A recent survey of U of M students revealed that 37 percent of those polled had engaged in high-risk drinking in the previous two weeks. While the rates were highest among twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-olds, with 46 and 47 percent reporting recent binge drinking (consuming five or more drinks in a row), the not-yet-legal eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds weren’t far behind, with binge-drinking rates between 35 and nearly 40 percent.

While heavy drinking among collegians has become a high-profile health concern, the problem is clearly not confined to college campuses here or elsewhere. In 2006 (the most recent year for which complete records are available), nearly 42,000 drunk drivers of all ages—a record number—were arrested on Minnesota roads.

“I’m not sure anyone has the answer to why binge-drinking rates are higher here than they are in other parts of the country,” says Carol Falkowski, chemical health director for the Minnesota Department of Human Services, noting that Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, the Dakotas, Illinois, Nebraska, and Wisconsin are among the worst eleven states in the category of high-risk consumption. To make matters worse, she adds, “in some parts of this region, there’s almost a pride that goes with being a heavy-drinking part of the country, and this makes it hard in terms of prevention.”

That’s an important point because preventing or delaying a teenager’s introduction to alcohol may play a crucial role later. A longitudinal study of 40,000 Americans found that those who started drinking before the age of fifteen had a 40 percent chance of developing alcoholism within their lifetime, while those who didn’t start until they were twenty-one had only a 10 percent chance of becoming an alcoholic—the same risk percentage as in the general population.

“There are compelling reasons to delay the onset of drinking,” says Falkowski; but getting that message across is a challenge. After all, studies show that seven out of ten teens have had their first drink by the time they reach eighteen. By that age, they also will have seen, by some estimates, 100,000 ads for alcohol, many of which play directly to teens’ desire to be cool, sexy, glamorous, and the life of the party. Still, the experts say, it is possible—despite the relentless pressure of example and marketing—to grab teens’ attention.

One number is worth mentioning: $20,000. That’s the potential cost of a drunk-driving offense in Minnesota, figuring in the legal fees, lost wages, license reinstatement charges, and increased insurance rates that often accompany a conviction. The twenty-three fatalities and 600 injuries caused by impaired underage drivers in Minnesota in 2006 may be more arresting figures, but Gordy Pehrson says those numbers are not nearly as effective in driving home the risks to teens. “You can talk about death and injury until you’re blue in the face, but teenagers think they’re invincible,” he says. “But the reality of [the effect on] the pocketbook really hits them.” So does the news that a DUI violation can follow them for the rest of their lives, reappearing every time they apply for a job or fill out an insurance application.

What else works? Knowing how their peers feel about the pressure to drink.

When Marty Harding, prevention strategies manager at Hazelden, asks high school students what sort of alcohol and drug education they want in their schools, most say they don’t need to hear anymore—they’d rather talk. “Most kids are really concerned about these issues and get the fact that alcohol use can have negative consequences, but they don’t get the chance to talk about it with their peers,” Harding says. The so-called “social influence model” of instruction, such as Class Action, allows teens to learn from their peers in a structured classroom setting, where they often discover that they’re not the only ones who are uncomfortable with the pressure. Roosevelt’s Kari Slade says she often hears her students “talk about the importance of doing what you know is responsible and right even in the midst of adults and a society that are making poor decisions regarding alcohol and other drug use. They’re pretty insightful.’’

Parents also play a “really important role in shaping their child’s attitudes about drugs and alcohol,” says Hazelden’s Jim Steinhagen. Unfortunately, he adds, “a lot of parents get caught in the dilemma of wanting to be friends with their kids and measuring their success on whether they’re liked and approved of, as opposed to whether they’re effective as parents.” A 2006 survey conducted by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America found that the number of parents who had four or more discussions with their teens about the dangers of drug and alcohol use actually dropped by 12 percent over the previous year. And without an ongoing dialogue, parents may underestimate the risks their children face. Another 2006 survey—by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University—found that eight out of ten parents believe that neither alcohol nor drugs are available at the parties their teens attend, while half of those teen partygoers report the opposite. “Somewhere, there’s a big disconnect,” says Falkowski.

That’s one reason the U of M has made an online seminar about alcohol use and abuse available to parents of all its students, not only parents of incoming freshmen for whom the course was designed. “While we know that parents can’t monitor a student’s drinking on a regular basis, research shows that parents continue to influence their child’s behavior during the college years,” says Marjorie Savage, the U’s parent program director. “When students perceive that parents know what they’re doing and disapprove of heavy drinking, students are less likely to binge drink.”

Steinhagen says that the growing body of knowledge about brain development—including recent findings that the brain isn’t fully grown until the early to mid twenties—should further encourage parents to talk about alcohol abuse with their children. “We have so much more information available to us, and we now know the risks of introducing mood-altering substances to key regions of the brain that aren’t fully developed,” Steinhagen says. “I think that dramatically changes what at one time might have seemed an acceptable rite of passage. We know the dangers better than we ever did before.”

The teens in Slade’s health class have considered the dangers for themselves and are now ready to render a verdict in the case of Foley v. Welby. The parents who served alcohol to minors Danny and Paul are found guilty of negligence by a vote of eight to one. The jurors also find that the plaintiff’s decisions that night played a part in the tragic outcome. Both sides are responsible.

It’s a lesson Slade hopes her students will take home with them tonight.

St. Paul–based freelancer Laura Billings writes regularly about health issues for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.