(2 of 10)
> In half of all murders in the U.S., either the killer or the victim—or both —have been drinking. A fourth of all suicides are found to have significant amounts of alcohol in their bloodstreams. People who abuse alcohol are seven times more likely to be separated or divorced than the general population.
> The dollar cost of alcoholism may be as much as $15 billion a year, much of it from lost work time in business, industry and the Government.
> At least half of each year's 55,500 automobile deaths and half of the 1 million major injuries suffered in auto accidents can be traced directly to a driver or pedestrian "under the influence."*
Many of the deaths and injuries are caused by the under-21 age group, and arrests of young people for drunken driving have skyrocketed since states began lowering the drinking age from 21. In the year following its lowering of the drinking age, for example, Michigan reported a 141% increase in such arrests.
But parents seem relatively unconcerned about their children's drinking. In fact, children who drink are often simply following the example set by their fathers and mothers. Teen-agers know that their parents make scenes if they catch them smoking marijuana. But if the youngsters come home drunk, most of them are merely sent quietly to bed. "Often when we report to a parent that his kid isn't acting the way he should and smells of liquor," says Don Samuels, a Miami drug-education coordinator, "the reaction is: Thank God! I thought he was on drugs.' " Actually, many teen-agers use both marijuana and alcohol.
The alcoholic tide has been pushed higher by the fast-selling, inexpensive pop wines, which disguise their alcoholic content with sweet fruit flavors. These wines make the transition from soda pop to alcohol just one easy step. "Kids seem to look on the stuff as a zippy, sophisticated soft drink," says Houston's Bruner Lee, education director for the Texas Council on Alcoholism. "But this 'kiddie stuff,' this pop wine, contains 9% alcohol—about twice as much as beer." After the pop wine phase is over, the kids often go on to much stronger drink.
Vanilla Extract. Most school officials are too embarrassed by the alcohol problem to do much more than reluctantly admit that it exists. One system that has faced up to it and conducted reliable surveys is in the suburban county of San Mateo, south of San Francisco. There, in 1970, school officials found, 11 % of the ninth grade boys (13-and 14-year-olds) said that they had drunk some kind of alcoholic beverage 50 or more tunes in the past year; in 1973 the figure had jumped to 23%. Among senior class boys (17-and 18-year-olds) the percentage of such relatively frequent drinkers rose during the same time span from 27% to 40%. Senior class girls drank less, but they are catching up fast: 29% said that they drank 50 or more times in 1973, compared with only 14% in 1970. Notes Paul Richards, an adviser at a San Mateo high school: "This school represents a socioeconomic background from welfare to upper middle class, and the drinkers come from all categories."