Teenagers talk candidly about drinking

I was drunk just twice when I was a teenager, and the first time was purely by accident. I lost my teetotaling virginity to four cups of Manischewitz (vintage 1974 — an excellent year), at what seemed at the time like an exceptionally long Pesach seder. Somewhere between Elijah’s visit and “Had Gadya,” I stood up, felt the ground shift and realized I wasn’t in Egypt anymore.

My second experience with alcohol was a cliché incorporating all of the classic elements of underage drinking: curiosity, peer pressure, a friend’s home with a full bar that might as well have had a flashing “Teenagers Drink for Free” sign over its rows of already opened bottles, and parents who were out for the evening. The night did not end well. If memory serves, my friend and I spent most of that evening on her bathroom floor.

And that was it. I’m sure I had a vague notion at the time that drinking took place at parties and under the bleachers at football games, but I didn’t hang out with kids who drank, so I had no real sense of what went on.

Flash forward a few years and now my friends and I are the parents of teens. Nearly all of my contemporaries who have older teenagers have had to deal with kids who not only drink, but who seem to drink for the sole purpose of getting drunk. If you are picturing a bunch of tattooed, overly pierced delinquents who attend school only on odd-numbered Wednesdays, I am sorry to disappoint you. The kids I am speaking of do well in school, are nice to their grandparents, and are otherwise well rounded, engaging and seemingly happy.

If high school is drinking boot camp, then college is the drinking war. I know that not only because drinking was the norm at my alma mater in the 1980s, but because the college students interviewed for this story confirmed it. Despite the fact that the legal drinking age is 21 years old, nearly all college students drink. As one college student put it: “Ninety-five percent of the kids I know drink, and drink to get drunk.”

“What about the other 5 percent? Do they intentionally abstain because underage drinking is illegal?” I asked.

“No, they just prefer to smoke weed.”

These teens’ experiences are supported by recent studies, which show that not only is high school drinking and drug use rampant, but the users are increasingly younger. In August, The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University released the disturbing results from its annual back-to-school study, which found that the percentage of middle-schoolers using, keeping or selling drugs on school grounds has increased 39 percent since last year.

Yes, some kids drink a lot in high school and college and grow up to do just fine. But what happens to the kids who don’t?

Doug Rosen, director of Partners in Prevention at Beit T’Shuvah, a West Los Angeles faith-based drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, said, “The kids who can’t stop in high school suffer — their academics suffer, their relationships with their parents suffer, and their future suffers. They watch as their friends go off to college, and they get kicked out of school.”

Once a kid is addicted, it is very hard for him or her to get sober, Rosen says.

“Once a brain has switched to an addict’s brain, whether it is alcohol or sex or marijuana, it can take years to bring them back. And statistics show that the younger the kid starts, the higher the likelihood that they will become an adult addict,” he said. “A kid who starts drinking at 13 or under has a 40 percent chance of becoming an alcoholic compared with a teen who starts at 17 or older, who has around a 10 percent chance.”

This story was precipitated by a question that appeared simple on its face: “What did I think about teenage drinking?”

My initial reaction — “I understand one or two ‘safe’ experiments, but otherwise I’m against it” —was, in hindsight, both pathetically naïve and simplistic. I had assumed that most teenagers experimented with alcohol but that the majority weren’t real drinkers. But my interviews with four very candid teens who had either just graduated high school or graduated high school in 2009 revealed that high school drinking is not only rampant (and college drinking universal), but that kids regularly drink for the purpose of getting drunk. We are not talking here about 18-year-olds celebrating the end of finals week with a single bottle of Corona or a nice glass of chardonnay.

So what is really going on with our teenagers?

What is going on is hard drinking at parties and “kickbacks” (a get together of a smaller group of kids) mostly starting in sophomore or junior year and escalating with age. Yes, these teens are conscious of the dangers of drunk driving, and every teen I spoke to emphasized that they took turns being the “designated driver” or simply arranged in advance to spend the night at the party house. (The “designated driver” didn’t necessarily have to be stone sober; a beer or two would not disqualify him or her from designated-driver status.) And what happened when someone in their group really got sick? The kids “handled” the barely conscious themselves. Having to call someone’s parent or an ambulance is considered an absolute last resort.

Alcohol is not hard to come by. The most popular method of acquisition seems to be using fake IDs or enlisting an older sibling or friend to purchase it. And apparently there are a couple of liquor stores that are known to accept even fairly obvious fake drivers’ licenses. Some kids steal from their parents’ liquor cabinets; others had parents who provided them with alcohol. One kid even told me he knew of a mother who got high with her son. (None of the kids I spoke with had parents who would ever purchase alcohol for them.) You don’t have to worry about your prized bottle of Opus One disappearing from your wine cellar — the overwhelming buzz of choice among teens comes from beer, vodka (straight or mixed) and sometimes tequila.

But the most confusing part of all this is the reasons these teenagers gave for drinking so frequently and so much. I had expected “There is a lot of peer pressure” or “My parents expect too much from me” or “Everyone does it, and I don’t want to feel left out.” But the universal explanations for getting drunk were “It is really fun” and “Drinking makes me feel less inhibited.”

One teenager I interviewed who admitted to drinking on occasion, but never to get drunk, said he thought teens drank to increase the “fun,” but excessive drinking was done for attention and was a good excuse to do stupid things that you wouldn’t do otherwise.

Why isn’t just being a teenager fun enough? From my perspective on the 40s downslope, having a body that hasn’t been subjected to decades of gravity, possessing both your natural hair color and wrinkle-free skin, living in a house without responsibility for the mortgage, being free from parenting worries and work responsibilities, having dinner waiting for you on the table every night, falling in love with someone new every week, and hanging out with your friends at school every day already seems really fun. And as someone who has spent many hours chauffeuring groups of laughing, joking, relaxed teenagers to various parties and kickbacks, I can assure you that they are absolutely having a great time even without the Absolut.

The inhibition issue is equally perplexing. Other than Las Vegas pole dancers and 3-year-olds, is there a group of people on the face of the Earth with fewer inhibitions than teenagers? You don’t need to have your own teenager to know what I’m talking about; simply check out any one of the many garbage teenage reality shows on MTV. Or, if you don’t have cable, drive to any local high school that doesn’t have a dress code and check out the attire.

So what is a parent to do? The students I interviewed said parents basically fall into one of three camps:

Camp No. 1 is composed of parents who have no clue that their kid is drinking and would “kill them” if they found out. Apparently, the threat of death was not a deterrent — the kids just lied more to their parents about where they were, who they were with and what they were doing. And one teen told me that the kids of these zero-tolerance parents end up drinking the most “to rebel.”

Camp No. 2 is composed of the “if you can’t beat ’em, enable ’em” parents, who provide their kids and their kids’ friends with alcohol at parties that take place at their house. Interestingly,  the kids I interviewed thought that this was more “weird” than cool.

Camp No. 3 are the parents who tell their kids that they don’t want them drinking, and especially drinking and driving or getting into a car with someone who has been drinking. And then comes this caveat: If you are ever in a situation where you are sick from drinking or need a ride home from a party where you have been drinking, you are to call me for a ride home, no questions asked.

Which camp do I fall in? Mostly Camp No. 3 — but with a caveat. There won’t be a “question asked,” but there will be a comment given: “I know the incredible person you are without alcohol, and you can’t be that incredible person if you are drunk.”