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SPH study: early drinking leads to alcohol-related acccidents in adulthood

By Brian Fitzgerald

It doesn't take a statistics genius to know that young people who drink have a higher risk of getting into drunk driving crashes than those who don't indulge in alcoholic beverages. A recent BU study, however, shows that the younger people are when they start drinking, the greater the probability that they will have alcohol-related accidents over the course of their adult lives.

	Ralph Hingson Photo by Vernon Doucette

According to the study, published in the January issue of the Journal of Accident Analysis and Prevention, respondents who began drinking before the age of 14 were seven times more likely than those who began drinking after age 21 to report being in a motor vehicle crash because of their drinking.

It has been known for years that efforts to prevent underage drinking have helped reduce the number of alcohol-related crashes among those under 21, "but this study suggests that there is a benefit later in life," says the study's lead author, BU School of Public Health Professor Ralph Hingson.

The study, funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, was based on face-to-face interviews of 42,862 people in 1992. The survey asked the respondents the age they started drinking (not counting small tastes or sips of alcohol), whether they drove after drinking too much, and whether they were in motor vehicle crashes because of their drinking.

"The traffic safety benefits of delaying drinking may extend well beyond the legal drinking age of 21," says Hingson, a nationally recognized researcher of alcohol and its effects on public safety. He notes that the figures applied even to respondents who were never dependent on alcohol.

Barbara Harrington, executive director of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), says the study shows that "we need better enforcement of minimum drinking age laws. There is a school of thought that says underage drinking is a rite of passage and that there is no way to control it, but we can control it. For our research shows that one in five liquor outlets allows a purchase of an alcoholic beverage by a young person without checking ID.

And some parents are under the mistaken assumption that if they let their children drink at home, they won't drive while drunk." All this does, she says, is facilitate their kids' comfort with alcohol. And it is a false comfort.
Harrington points to the well-publicized 1997 case of a parent from Quincy, Mass., charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors after throwing a party to celebrate his son's graduation from Thayer Academy. One of the guests, 18-year-old Gregory Smith, died when the pickup truck he was driving crashed into a telephone pole after leaving the celebration. His blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit. Another adult testifying at the trial admitted to playing drinking games with at least three underage youths at the party. That parent was acquitted, mainly because partygoers said that although alcohol was plentiful, he did not serve them or encourage them to drink.

Hingson, a national board member of MADD along with Harrington, will participate in a MADD youth summit May 5 to 7 at the Westin Hotel in Waltham, Mass., to propose policy recommendations to curtail underage drinking.

The study comes a year after another study by Hingson that links the onset of drinking at an early age with the involvement in physical fights after drinking. Published in the January 2001 issue of Pediatrics and based on interviews from the same 1992 survey, it shows that relative to people who did not begin drinking until age 21 or older, says Hingson, "those who started drinking before age 17 were at least three times more likely to have ever been in a fight after drinking." Like the drunk driving study, it shows a tendency for those drinking early in life to participate in at-risk behavior later in adult life.

The interviews on which both Hingson studies are based are from the U.S. Census Bureau's 1992 National Longitudinal Epidemiologic Survey, a national probability survey that includes the most precise estimates to date of alcohol abuse and dependence in U.S. adults.

While alcohol consumption has become a social tradition in the lives of young Americans, Hingson scoffs at the notion that younger drinkers are able to "hold their liquor" better as they get older because they have more drinking experience. "I think the opposite is true," he says. "The statistics show that people who start drinking earlier are more likely to become dependent, and they are more likely to develop a tolerance. It becomes necessary to drink more in order to get the effect that they want."

Harrington adds that in the United States there is a commonly held perception that American young people experience more alcohol-related problems than their counterparts in Europe, where there are more liberal drinking age laws and attitudes. But the 1995 European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs, a collaborative initiative by the governments of 26 European countries, shows that "about half of those European countries have intoxication rates among young people that are higher than the intoxication rates in the United States," she says.

To read Hingson's study, visit www.nhtsa.dot.gov.

25 January 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations