Is Your Child Immune? Underage Drinking Doesn’t Discriminate

Parade.com recently wrote about the rising trend of extreme underage drinking. Binge drinking is becoming a growing problem. Physicians in emergency rooms are seeing kids come in with blood alcohol levels four to five times the legal limit for driving. “At that level 50% of people die,” says Dr. Mary Claire O’Brien, an emergency medicine physician and assistant professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina.  She goes on to point out that ten years ago those level were only seen in chronic alcoholics.

Some kids who want to get drunk fast to ease their social anxiety, are finding increasingly more dangerous ways to do this.

For example:

• Mixing alcohol with super-caffeinated energy drinks
• Flavored malt drinks in 23.5-ounce cans, each containing a serious dose of alcohol
• Shift in preference from beer to hard liquor
• Mixing up concoctions of hard liquor, fruit juice and often Everclear, whose alcohol content can be as high as 190 proof. Some throw in energy drinks as well calling it Jungle Juice or “Suicide in a Kettle.”
• Influence of social media where kids share their recipes and tales of their exploits

Don’t think your child is immune. According to the Centers for Disease Control:

• 90% of all teen drinking occurs as binge drinking which peaks at age 19.
• 41% of twelfth graders report having had a drink in the previous 30 days
• 72% of college age kids report they have had a drink in the previous 30 days
• 200,000 adolescents visit emergency rooms each year because of drinking incidents
• More than 1,700 college students die each year from drinking and the second hand effects.
• May and June when kids are celebrating proms and graduations is an especially vulnerable time.

What has become particularly troubling to Dr. O’Brien is the combining of energy drinks that have far more caffeine than coffee or cola, with alcohol. The caffeine blocks the part of alcohol that makes you sleepy and might otherwise cause you to pass out. Consequently, you are able to drink far more than you might have. Sometimes when these kids reach the hospital they have to be put temporarily on respirators because of depressed breathing.

A survey was conducted in 2006 of 4,271 students from more than 10 universities and learned that a quarter of the kids in the past 30 days had mixed alcohol with energy drinks either the premixed kind or Red Bull and Vodka.

These kids:

• Got drunk twice as often and drank more per session than those who had alcohol without caffeine.
• Were more likely to be taken advantage of sexually or take advantage of someone else sexually.
• Were more likely to drive drunk

Some colleges are beginning to ban energy drinks containing alcohol after seeing the numbers of students ending up in emergency rooms and needing to be hospitalized. The FDA has stepped in and last year ordered the makers of four brands including Phusion Projects which sells Four Loko to remove the caffeine. It has been reformulated, and does not contain caffeine, but each 23.5 ounce can is equivalent to four to five beers.  Four Loko has been on YouTube, with more than 5,000 videos raving about it’s virtues. The makers of Four Loko states that they are fully committed to ensure that their products are consumed legally and responsibly.

Even so, Four Loko is a flavored malt drink and has an alcohol content of 12%. With rap star, Snoop Dogg as the spokesperson, their marketing campaign feels aimed at underage drinkers. The company announced last May that they will lower the alcohol content to 8%.

Teen’s growing preference for hard liquor over beer is setting off alarms. Hard liquor is replacing beer in drinking games, and kids can easily drink seven or eight shots at a time. Teens can be having 10 or more drinks. One college student from Colorado explained that, “Everyone is so much friendlier after a couple of drinks It takes the pressure off.”

After 14 kids were hospitalized during a graduation celebration in 2008, Colby College in Maine studied the issue and in 2010 banned hard liquor on most of the campus.

 The Long Term Damage

The adolescent brain is more sensitive to alcohol toxicity than adults including being vulnerable to cell death,” says Dr. Fulton Crews, director of the Bowles Center for Alcoholic Studies at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “We found that one high dose of alcohol caused significant loss of brain stems cells.”

“Early drinking poses a high risk later in life. Early drinking makes you 40% to 60% more likely to become an alcoholic, regardless of family history,” Dr. Crew says.  Studies show a potential for permanent memory impairment.

What Parents Can Do

Here are some steps to take if you are concerned your child might be binge drinking:

• Know the Warning Signs. A drop in grades, changes in behavior and mood, a new set of friends, memory lapses and difficulty concentrating are signs of extreme drinking.
• Open a Dialogue. Ask your kids what kinds of experiences they’re having, make your personal values clear, and calmly lay out the risks. Studies have found that parents who combine clear expectations of accountability with support and warmth have more success in curbing binge drinking than either strictly authoritarian or over indulgent parents.
• Establish a Code Word. Before your kids go out, agree on a phrase they can say if they are in an uncomfortable situation and need to give you a signal to come get them right away, no questions asked.
• If  You Tell Your Kids Just One Thing, Make It This: “If someone has been drinking Jungle Juice or doing shots in a short amount of time, their blood alcohol level can continue to rise dangerously after they appear to fall asleep,” Dr. O’Brien explains. This could have fatal consequences. If you cannot wake someone, call 911. The worse that can happen is that you will be embarrassed or your parents will get angry. But the alternative is far worse. We all know kids make mistakes. We just don’t want kids to make mistakes that will permanently change or end their lives.

Be Well.

What are your thoughts on teen binge drinking? It would be wonderful to know.

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