Drinking too much, too young: trying to find an answer to the persistent habit of binge drinking among young people vexes the nation's policymakers.

The stories have been shocking, abruptly reminding a nation of a problem that remains unsolved: in the last hall of 2004, six college-age students in Colorado died as a result of binge drinking.

Although each fatality was different in its circumstance--Samantha Spady, 19, a sophomore at Colorado State University, died after drinking vanilla vodka and more than two dozen beers, while Benett Bertoli, 20, also a CSU student, was found dead on a couch at an off-campus party from a combination of alcohol, methadone and benzodiazepene--the events leading up to the deaths were maddeningly familiar.

In almost every case, the fatalities were the unexpected ending to a boisterous party almost always involving large gatherings of young people on weekend nights consuming prodigious amounts of alcohol, sometimes for two days straight.

The number of Colorado deaths from binge drinking in late 2004 was exceptionally large, but the state is not alone. It killed Thomas Ryan Hauser, 23, a student at Virginia Tech in September. Blake Hammontree, 19, died at his fraternity house at the University of Oklahoma, also in September. Bradley Kemp, 20, died in October at his home near the University of Arkansas, where he was a student. Steven Judd died celebrating his 21st birthday with fraternity friends at New Mexico State University in November.

Those deaths did not occur in a vacuum. According to statistics from the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, more than 1,400 college students die from alcohol-related deaths each year including motor vehicle crashes. Unfortunately, that number has remained constant even though both high school and college-age drinking has decreased.

"The numbers have been going in the right direction," says Peter Cressy, the president of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. "There is today less regular use of alcohol on college campuses than there was 20 years ago. There has been a drop in the number of college students both of age and not of age who drink at all during any given month. And the data for eighth, 10th, and 12th graders who consume alcohol has also shown a downward trend."

BUCKING THE TREND

But what hasn't changed, industry, health and alcohol experts all agree, is the stubborn number of young people who continue to engage in destructive behavior.

"The issue is not the 30,000 kids on the campus of the University of Colorado, of any other school, who drink legally or illegally, but somehow manage to do it without any great peril," says Ralph Blackman, the president of the Century Council, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to fighting drunk driving and underage drinking.

"The issue is binge drinking and the continuing large numbers of kids who insist on over consumption to a level that has a very decided risk for a dangerous result," continues Blackman. "That is a phenomenon that very much remains with us."

Trying to find a specific reason for the persistence of binge drinking among the young is a subject that both vexes and causes great debate among the nation's policymakers. Do younger people just naturally like to get drunk, or in some cases, very drunk? Is it a matter of upbringing of income? Is it a reflection of a troubled and anxious society? "You could ask questions like that all day, and not really get any solid answers," says Paul Hanson, a professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York, Potsdam.

"The only thing you could be sure of is that no matter how many different ways we approach it with different solutions, binge drinking continues among the very young, generation after generation."

But some experts believe one thing that is different with those who ate a part of what demographers call the Millennials--those born in 1980 of after--and their predecessors, is that binge drinking today is out of the closet and celebrated on almost a worldwide basis due to the Internet.

"There is a huge difference from when many of us went to school in the 1960s and '70s and today," says Stephen Bentley, a coordinator of substance abuse services at the Wardenberg Health Center at the University of Colorado.

"Back in our day we really did not want any attention of any kind, we did not want adults of the world to know that we were drinking and partying excessively," continues Bentley.

"But today young people who engage in this kind of behavior ate actually very proud of what they ate doing, they post their own Web sites about their parties so that everyone else can see what they did."

One of the Web sites, called shamings.com, features pictures of drunken young men, updated on a regular basis, sometimes sleeping in their own vomit, often hall naked, and many times covered with magic marker salutations alluding to their drinking prowess of lack thereof.

One of the Web site creators, Ricky Van Veen, explained to the Washington Post the guidelines used by the Web site in determining whether of not to post a binge drinker's picture: "The standard rule is, if you fall asleep with your shoes on, you're fair game," he said.

YOUTH TARGETS

For Julia Sherman, field director with the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, binge drinking self-promotion is almost a natural outgrowth of what she says is the alcohol industry's "preoccupation with the young."

"The ads that ate being put out there today are not your Mom and Pop, 'Mabel, Black Label,' ads of another era, but ads that ate very much geared toward an exceedingly young demographic," she says.

"The whole ad focus of the alcohol industry has changed both in tenor and in numbers," says Sherman. "Their Web site ads now feature computer games and premiums for downloading music. They run ads in what are called the 'laddie magazines,' that ate edgier than anything adults are seeing in their magazines. It is all part of a non-stop, never-ending pitch for the youth market."

According to a study released by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth last October, the number of alcohol ads on TV jumped by nearly 90,000 between 2001 and 2003, with some 23 percent of the ads "more likely to be seen by the average underage person for every four seen by the average adult."

Cressey of the Distilled Spirits Council, among other industry leaders, disputes that there has been any concerted targeting of young people, and notes that his group will not permit any member to advertise where the media is not at least a 70/30, adult to minor, demographic.

"We also require through our code that all models in our ads be at least 25 years old," adds Cressey, a requirement that is also generally followed by members of the Beer Institute.

But even working within those parameters, the impact of drinking ads, usually showing young people at a beach party, rap concert, or skate boarding, remains a matter of contention.

"The problem is that how we view television has changed greatly in the last generation," says Sherman. "It used to be that there was one TV and the entire family was watching it, which meant that there would probably be some sort of adult filtering or response to whatever the ad message was. But that is much harder today when over 30 percent of kids aged two to eight, and two-thirds over the age of eight, have their own TVs in their own rooms."

The end result may not only be a message received early on that drinking alcohol is attractive, but an actual inability at an age leading all the way up to college to discern alcohol's potential danger. "There is a lot of research out there showing that even up to the age of 21 and beyond a young body is not fully developed and it does not absorb alcohol as well as it might in an older person," says Blackman of the Century Council. "Just as important is the evidence that your brain is not fully developed at that point either, so that issues of risk-taking and behavior are assessed in a different way."

To make matters worse, State University of New York's Hanson says, zero tolerance alcohol programs or efforts to make campuses virtually alcohol-free have a funny way of backfiring. "Prohibition is a classic example of how the laws in these matters can end up being counterproductive by actually making the thing that is being prohibited more attractive. That remains especially true for young people who don't like to be told what not to do."

And when that happens," says Hanson, "young people very often find themselves involved in these dangerous events centered around heavy episodic drinking, which is the very last thing we want to see happen."

TEACHING MODERATION

Hanson has also noticed in his own research that the percentage of students who drink tends to decrease as they go from being freshmen to seniors. He says policymakers would be wiser to focus on what he calls "harm reduction policies" that acknowledge young people are going to drink no matter what, but emphasize responsible drinking through education--even to minors.

Similarly Colorado University's Bentley has noticed the effectiveness of the restorative justice approach on many college campuses that require students who have engaged in binge drinking to face the people who suffered the consequences of their behavior when they were drunk.

"That means the neighbors who were trying to study when the party was blaring," says Bentley, "of friends who had to take care of them when they were throwing up all over themselves of were otherwise dead drunk."

Legislatively, some lawmakers ate looking at keg-registration laws in order to keep better track of who buys what for whom, particularly when such kegs end up at parties heavily populated with minors. So far, 24 states and the District of Columbia have adopted keg registration laws of varying severity.

"It is only a tool that might possibly reduce binge drinking and underage drinking," says Arizona Representative Ted Downing, who has introduced legislation requiring the state to put tracking numbers on every keg of beer sold.

"The way my legislation reads is that if you want to buy a keg, you have to show identification, fill out a form, leave a deposit, and detail where the keg is going to go and for what purpose" says Downing.

Other lawmakers believe that by making underage consumption and distribution more legally challenging, they can, at the very least, chip away at the roughly 33 percent of the nation's college students who are below the age of 21.

"It's worth a try," says Colorado Representative Angie Paccione, who has introduced legislation making it a class one misdemeanor to distribute alcohol to someone under the age of 21, with jail time of up to 18 months and fines topping out at $5,000.

"We want to give the DAs a tool that they can use for prosecuting and that the police can use in order to effect behavior changes," Paccione says, adding that problem college drinking is very often proceeded by problem high school drinking.

"I was a dean in a high school and have seen more than my share of kids who have had liquid lunches," she says. "So I know that this is a problem that begins very early."

EDUCATION WORKS

And although a new look at both underage and binge drinking from the legislative perspective may be in order, Jeff Becker, president of the Beer Institute, says lawmakers should not lose sight of the progress that has already been made in reducing both high school and college drinking.

"The education and awareness programs have really worked, whether it is at the college or high school level; and I think lawmakers should take credit for any support they have given to those efforts and continue those programs," says Becker.

"Maybe these most recent deaths will serve as a wake-up call and get all of us to look once more at what works and what doesn't work," he adds. "But from the community, family and school level it is very clear that making kids aware of the dangers has also made them smarter. And I don't think we should stop doing that."

In Connecticut, Senator Biagio "Billy" Ciotto, a long-time advocate of programs that educate high school students on the harmful effects of both drinking and driving and binge drinking, says he remains convinced that lawmakers should concentrate on what he calls the "realistic goal of reduction" vs. the "impossible idea," of elimination.

"You are never going to get rid of this kind of drinking completely," Ciotto says. "But I have no doubt in my mind that you can reduce the abuse simply by staying with it, never giving up, always trying to let kids know, without lecturing them, about the harmful effects of alcohol abuse."

Ciotto's efforts have even won the support of the Connecticut Coalition to Stop Underage Drinking, which named him "Outstanding Legislator in Reducing Underage Drinking" in 2004.

"I think they and just about everyone else recognize that we have to work on the big majority of kids who will not abuse alcohol if they know the dangers, and just figure that there is always going to be a minority that will do what they want to do no matter what, he says."

Arizona's Downing agrees: "It would be very foolish for any state representative or senator to feel that you can propose a bill that will somehow magically get rid of the problems of binge drinking or underage drinking."

"You can't," says Downing. "And we have to admit that. All you can really do is nudge things in a certain direction, which is what so many of our laws do anyway. If people are going to behave in the wrong way no matter what, there is only so much we can do. But we can help those who want to do the right thing, of don't want to break any laws just to have a little fun. That is the group we need to appeal to."

BINGE DRINKING--THE FACTS

* In 2001, 44% of U.S. college students engaged in binge drinking; this rate has not changed since 1993.

* 51% of the men drank five or more drinks in a row.

* 40% of the women drank four or more drinks in a row.

* Students more likely to binge drink are white, age 23 or younger, and are residents of a fraternity or sorority.

* 75.1% of fraternity residents and 62.4% of sorority residents report binge drinking.

* Binge drinkers in high school are three times more likely to binge in college.

* From 1993 to 2001, more students abstained from alcohol (16% to 19%), but more also frequently drank heavily (19.7% to 22.8%).

* Just as many freshman (those under 21) as seniors binge drink.

* Frequent binge drinkers are eight times more likely than others to miss a class, fall behind in schoolwork, get hurt or injured, and damage property.

* 91% of women and 78% of the men who are frequent binge drinkers consider themselves to be moderate or light drinkers.

* 1,400 college students every year die from alcohol-related causes; 1,100 of these deaths involve drinking and driving.

Sources: Harvard University's School of Public Health; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 

RELATED ARTICLE: Young drunk drivers.

Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for 15- to 20-year-olds, and alcohol is a factor in 36 percent of traffic fatalities involving drivers under age 21. In fact, young drunk drivers are twice as likely to be involved in fatal accidents as are adult drunk drivers.

In 2003, more than 3,600 drivers under age 21 were killed in motor vehicle crashes, and 25 percent of those young drivers had a blood alcohol content (BAC) of .08 or higher. That's considered legally drunk in every state.

As young drivers get older, they are even more likely to drink and drive. Almost a third of 20-year-old drivers who were killed in crashes in 2003 were legally drunk at the time. Those are alarming figures, particularly for an age group that isn't even legally allowed to drink. It also factors into a disturbing pattern: Studies have shown that the younger a person is when they start to drink, the more likely they are to drink and drive throughout their lifetime.

To reduce the incidence of youth drunk driving, all 50 states have adopted "zero tolerance" laws that establish a separate BAC standard of .02 or lower for drivers under the age of 21. Most of the states adopted .02 as their youth BAC standard, with the remainder at .01 or .00, a true zero tolerance for youth drunk driving.

Zero tolerance laws have been effective. Alcohol involvement for drivers aged 15 to 20 years dropped by 6 percent nationwide from 1993 to 2003. The experience of individual states has varied depending on how long their law has been in effect and on how low they set their youth BAC standard. Despite the improvement, far too many young drivers are still hitting the road after hitting the bottle. Reducing their access to alcohol is critical in saving lives.

--Jeanne Mejeur, NCSL 

Free-lancer Garry Boulard is a frequent contributor to State Legislatures.