Survey: Underage Drinking Dips in Long Beach

“I wanted to learn more about underage drinking and what we can do about it as parents and as a school administrator,” said Michelle Natali, principal of Long Beach Middle School and a member of the Coalition to Prevent Underage Drinking at Long Beach Medical Center.

LBMC’s Coalition gathered last week at the Long Beach Library, along with concerned parents and city officials, to discuss the public health crisis of underage drinking in their town. The meeting is held each year, in part to update the community on their latest findings. This included a comparison of surveys, one taken in 2008 and the other last year.

A 2008 survey polling junior at Long Beach High School, which found that 50.8 percent had reported alcohol use in the past 30 days, in comparison to a New York State poll in which 28 percent of students had reported alcohol use during the same time period. LBMC received a New York State Prevention First Grant to try to reduce those numbers. 

A later survey conducted in the fall of 2011 of 932 LBHS juniors and their use of alcohol found that 45 percent reported drinking as compared to 28 percent of students in the New York State survey. While underage drinking in Long Beach has gone down about 5 percent in just two years, students polled in New York State during that time decreased only 2 percent.

“The collaboration in this community has gotten us to where we are today,” said Judy Vining, Coalition Coordinator for LBMC’s Coalition to Prevent Underage Drinking. “Where we are now is a lot better than where we were 10 years ago when we started, but we still have some way to go.”

Vining admitted that the underage drinking rates have not been greatly reduced among high school juniors, but the coalition has found that drinking amongst seventh graders has gone down by 32 percent and 20 percent by ninth graders. This could be due to the exposure of these teens to the coalition’s programs and policies at an earlier age, as well as being part of a community where the Social Host Law has been enforced since 2006.

However, teenagers find different ways to gain access to alcohol. During the meeting, Vining noted that Long Beach is unique in that it has a high percentage of strangers buying alcohol for teens. Teens will hang out by the Long Island Rail Road train station on Park Avenue or near 7-Eleven on Long Beach Boulevard and will wait to ask men in their early 20’s to purchase alcohol for them because they are more likely to assist than women or older adults.

“LBMC believes that this is a public health crisis and we have committed a tremendous amount of resources in responding to the issues surrounding alcohol and drug abuse”, said LBMC’s CEO Douglas Melzer. One of many resources at LBMC is the inpatient medically managed detoxification unit, which in the next two weeks will be expanded from eight to 16 beds.

Police Commissioner Michael Tangney explained: “In my 34 years in law enforcements I have not seen a change at all in DWIs, alcohol or drug use.”

So far this year Long Beach, a city of three square miles, has 95 arrests for driving while intoxicated. “A lot of people in the drug counseling field label marijuana as the gateway drug; it is not, it is alcohol,” the commissioner said.  

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The meeting’s featured guest speaker was Dr. David Jernigan, director of the Center on Alcohol and Marketing to Youth (CAMY). He focuses on the media and the influence alcohol marketing has on teens. Jernigan said that studies have found that the more kids are exposed to alcohol marketing, the more they are likely to start drinking or to drink more if they have already started.

CAMY estimated that each year 4,700 underage youth die from excessive alcohol use. Not only is there growing evidence that underage drinking impairs crucial aspects of youthful brain development, but young people who begin drinking before the age of 15 are five times more likely to have alcohol related problems later in life than those who begin drinking at age 21.

There is no argument that social media plays a significant role in most teenagers’ daily lives, Jernigan said, and teens are exposed to alcohol from more than just television. Alcohol companies interact with underage youth on Facebook, Twitter, Four Square and other social media sites. Alcohol companies were actually among the first to purchase paid advertising on Twitter.

The global alcohol trade is worth nearly $1 trillion and alcohol advertising is self regulated. The three most effective strategies to reduce underage binge drinking are raising taxes, advertising restrictions and screening and brief intervention, Jernigan believes.  

“The dirty little secret here is not just stopping underage drinking,” he said. “We got to change everybody’s drinking. We got to take on the role that alcohol has come to play in our communities.”