The cost of underage drinking has cost the US government millions of dollars in the past couple of years. The cost covers anything from violent crimes to car accidents. About $250,000,000 was spent to help reinforce the underage drinking laws that already exist. .
Each year more and more youth are becoming involved with drinking. Reports show that in 1996, 9.5 million drinkers were age 12 to 20, with 4.4 of them being binge drinkers and 1.9 million were heavy drinkers. The younger teenagers start drinking the more likely they are to develop an addition. When these teenagers start to drive motor accidents are increasingly horrible, in fact motor vehicle accidents is the number one leading cause of death in teens today. .
Even the most improbable of statistics are often repeated by news media as fact and become part of public belief. It is now commonly believed that the average young person will have seen 100,000 beer commercials between the age of two and eighteen But just think --- sixteen years or about 5,844 days occur between a person's second and eighteenth birthday. To see 100,000 beer commercials in that period, a person would have to see an average of more than seventeen a day! Common sense alone should have been enough to dispel the myth. But this clearly absurd statistic has been gullibly repeated over and over. Results of ongoing surveys confirmed that binge drinking is the most serious drug problem on college campuses. Overall, 44 percent of the students were binge drinkers. Among men, 50 percent were binge drinkers; among women the figure was 39 percent. Two in five students drank during the school year but were not binge drinkers. One in six students did not drink at all. Intoxication is often the main goal. .
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Race/ethnicity. White students were over twice as likely to be binge drinkers compared to other racial/ethnic groups. .
Religion. Students who said that religious participation is not very important to them were more than twice as likely to be binge drinkers compared to other students.
