By age 19, the power of social motives to influence drinking declines in study respondents. That information leads to news we can use in prevention. In addition, study results showed that social motives were better predictors of alcohol misuse in young European Americans that in African Americans who more often reported abusing alcohol as a coping mechanism. This, say study authors, suggests that cultural differences in motives for heavy drinking may exist among older adolescents. No consistent gender differences in motives were determined by the study.
Alcohol kills more teenagers than all other drugs combined.
Young people illegally consume almost 3.6 billion drinks annually - or 10 million drinks each day. Underage drinking has significant consequences. Eight young people a day die in alcohol- related crashes. Young people who began drinking before age 15 were four times more likely to develop alcohol dependence than those who began drinking at age 21. Sixty percent of college women diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease were drunk at the time of infection.