Teens harrass TV reporter who reported on underage drinking

a. You don't have to have young children to have this opinion.

b. Having young children doesn't automatically mean that one's opinions change.

You don't suddenly become enlightened because you or your spouse gave birth.

 

Fetch me a...

Oh hell, an orange juice newb.

 

I agree with you on this. I agree that it is a story. I do not agree that underage drinking is an epidemic, or somehow worse now that in past years.

 

Legal alcohol abuse is a bigger problem.

 

But TV and movies taught me that having a kid fixes everything in your life!

Yes, teen drinking is getting bad. I'm 24, so I can only rely on the stories my dad has told or from friend's parents, but the way they tell it, high school drinking in the 1970s was mainly just beer. Then again, they grew up in the country.

When I was in high school, most of the people I knew getting drunk were doing it on hard liquor, not beer. I can't count how many times I had to drive people home or go pick them up for being too messed up. It was pretty annoying.

I'm not against alcohol. I'll have a drink every month or so, but it's abusing alcohol that's the problem. I've always felt the younger you are, the more likely you are to abuse alcohol because you don't know how to handle it in moderation. And that's an easy way to open a door to alcoholism.

 

Matt, being a child of the '70s, I'd have to say that you're partly right in that most people started with beer ... or cheap wine.

But there was plenty of hard liquor around ... and plenty of binge beer drinking.

 

I'll ditto all of this. I graduated high school in 1973, and I'm not proud of the fact that by then I'd had plenty of experience both with hard liquor and binge drinking. And I grew up in a smallish town (10,000 population).

 

Drinking age for us was 18 in Maryland, 35 miles away. So there was a lot of pre-college drinking ... and a lot of dangerous trips back into Pennsylvania.

We'd even turn a 40-minute trip home into a three-hour one, because it's not as if there was anyplace back home where we could sit down and drink what we'd bought in Hagerstown.

 

Wow. I knew my online subscription to the Times would finally pay off...

According to an article earlier this month, researchers at the University of Michigan have found that alcohol use among teenagers is at its lowest level since they started surveying in 1975.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/the-kids-are-more-than-all-right/?scp=2&sq=teenagers&st=cse

 

so there is an epidemic of teen sobriety!

 

So did they run the Budweiser commercial before or after this segment?

 

Teen drinking? Not new. Pre-teen drinking? Maybe.

If kids are having sex younger than before (and hey, studies say so), they're definitely drinking younger. I'm not so sure it's the ones that start a year or so before high school is out that are the worst off. I think it's starting when you've still got all of high school ahead of you. I could be wrong, but I think things are still trending that way.

I bought underage in a suburban area that is/was highly concentrated with 5-0, not an inner city. Still buy there. No one got hurt. Typically these things only become a story during sweeps, or when someone goes, does something stupid and dies. Is it news? No, but I understand why it's reported on and don't have a problem.