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,� - Youth and Alcohol: Key Facts and Prevention Ideas High school students lack essential knowledge about alcohol and its effects. Nationwide, an estimated 5.6 million junior and senior high school students are unsure of the legal age to purchase alcohol; one third do not understand the intoxicating effects of alcohol; and more than 2.6 million do not know a person can die from an overdose of alcohol. A projected 259,000 students think that wine coolers or beer cannot get you drunk, cannot make you sick, or cannot do as much harm as other beverages (OIG, 199 1). . Each year, junior and senior high school students drink an estimated 35% of all wine coolers and about 1.1 billion cans of beer (OIG, 199 1). Binge/Heavy Drinking Recent national surveys fi�nd high rates of binge drinkl�ng among high school and college students and college-age young adults. High school students. According to the 1995 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 39% of twelfth graders and 30% of tenth graders reported that they had consumed five or more drinks of alcohol on at least one occasion during the last 30 days (defined as "episodic heavy drinking"). This figure was 33% for all high school students, 36% for male high school students, and 29% for female high school students (CDC, 1996). According to the Monitoring the Future Study, about 32% of the nation's twelfth graders, 24% of tenth graders, and 14% of eighth graders reported in 1998 that they had consumed five or more drinks of alcohol on at least one occasion in the last two weeks. In addition, about 33% of twelfth graders, 2 1% of tenth graders, and 8% of eighth graders reported that they had been drunk during the last 30 days (Johnston et al, in preparation). In the 1997 College Alcohol Study of the Harvard School of Public Health, 43% of college students reported they had engaged in binge drinking. Binge drinking is defined in this study as consuming five or more drinks in a row (males) or four or more drinks in a row (females) during the last two weeks. Male students binged at a higher rate than female students (48% versus 39%). Nearly 71% of the college binge drinkers in the study binged in high school (Wechsler et al, 1998). . The 1997 Harvard study also found that 19% of college students were abstainers and 21% were"frequent binge drinkers" (i.e., they had binged three or more times in the last two weeks). Four of five(81%)residents of fraternities or sororities were binge drinkers. (Wechsler et al, 1998). Page 2 of 12 http://www.ama-assn.org/speciaUaos/alcohol l /research/ythfcts.htm 10/26/99