Chicagoist: Midwestern Underage Drinkers Like To Binge

UTV

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:28:58 -0600

We beat the South? Are you kidding me?

Thunderbelly

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:18:30 -0600

One drink = 12 oz beer 6 oz of wine 1 oz of hard alcohol

Albanyparkour

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:53:27 -0600

So if you have 5 drinks, of any alcoholic content, one one occasion in a month you're a binge drinker? What's a drink consist of? Glass of wine? Shot of whiskey? I'm not just quibbling here, but if my (hypothetical) kid drank a bunch of wine coolers at a party I'd be far less concerned than if they were drinking less on a more frequent basis.

Margaret Lyons

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:06:04 -0600

From the study: "Binge use – Five or more drinks on the same occasion (i.e., at the same time or within a couple of hours of each other) on at least 1 day in the past 30 days (includes heavy use). Heavy use – Five or more drinks on the same occasion on each of 5 or more days in the past 30 days."

Albanyparkour

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:03:25 -0600

Binge drinking is defined as what exactly? Wikipedia tells us 5 or more drinks (male), or 4 or more drinks (female), in about 2 hours. But it's also any "heavy drinking". Frankly, those numbers seem low to me. Yes, teens drink, sometimes to excess. Let's all panic and keep them in bubbles til they're 21. Look, some folks are going to become alcoholics, drive drunk, do awful and terrible things. But they're the minority. The panicky alcohol zero-tolerance policies that schools are adopting are just making kids sneakier and stressing them out. Driving them to drink.

itchy

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:40:36 -0600

CHARTS! GRAPHS! very executive, you shouldve at least offered us a beer while we read these charts and junk.

JThreeK

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:05:13 -0600

Um, where are the error bars on that graph?!