Alcohol is a factor in the three leading causes of death among young people, including homicide, suicide, and unintentional injuries. Underage drinking leads to violent crime, unwanted pregnancies, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, school failures, and a wide range of other youth problems.
Beer is the alcoholic beverage most commonly consumed by underage persons.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, junior and senior high school students drink 1.1 billion beers each year. To confirm that each purchaser appeared younger than 21, we took them, separately, to street locations in the Dupont Circle and Columbia Heights areas and asked fifty adult passers-by to estimate their ages. The average estimate of the purchasers' ages ranged from 18.7 to 20.9 years. With respect to one of the purchasers, only three of fifty respondents guessed that he was 21 or older. For the purchaser who appeared the oldest, who is actually 21 years old, just twenty-two of the fifty respondents believed her to be more than 21 years.