Living: One Less for the Road?

Gary Kamiya, 31, a San Francisco cabby with a master's degree in English, remains cheerfully unaffected by the trend to lighter drinking. He may have a beer at lunch, perhaps a Manhattan cocktail or wine at dinner during the week, and he drinks every weekend as well. "I've continued to slam down the hard stuff with as much alacrity as ever," he says. Indeed, for every yuppie who has traded in vodka for mineral water, there seems to be a social drinker like Kamiya clinging to the old ways--or a teenager taking up a habit he may not be able to handle. The result: although drinking is definitely down nationwide, many Americans still drink as lustily as ever and alcohol abuse remains a major social problem.

Owing to pressure from Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and other groups, laws and attitudes on intoxicated drivers have changed rapidly. The good news is that deaths of drunk drivers are down 32% since 1980, and deaths from cirrhosis of the liver, whose principal cause is heavy consumption of alcohol, declined steadily over the same period. The bad news is that vast ! numbers of Americans are still willing to drive drunk. Ralph Milstead, director of Arizona's department of public safety, estimates that one of every 100 drivers on the road on Saturday and Sunday nights is "absolutely blitzed, on the verge of comatose." Drunkenness is involved in 30% to 50% of traffic deaths, 45% of all fatal falls, and 50% to 70% of homicides. "Alcohol is a factor in the ten leading causes of premature death," says Nancy Thompson of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. "It cuts across a lot of diseases."

The U.S. has an estimated 10 million alcoholics, and a growing number of them belong to the younger age brackets. West Paces Ferry Hospital in Atlanta reports that the average age of people coming in for treatment dropped from 49 to 39 in the past decade. A study showed that 70% of Georgia's eighth- graders had used alcohol, and one expert estimates that the state had 45,000 teen alcoholics. One of every five freshmen at the University of Minnesota admits to being a heavy drinker, which is twice the rate found in 1975. A survey of 1,200 students in fraternities and sororities on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sketched a portrait of young people heavily dependent on booze to handle stress. More than half said they drink when angry or upset, three-quarters said they drink to get drunk, and 42% admitted they have trouble putting down the bottle once they start. Almost 30% had at least one accident or injury while drunk.

At many high schools, some students manage to sneak away for a few beers during lunch period. "Teenage drinking is definitely the biggest problem we now have in our schools," says Peggy Sapp, executive director of Informed Families of Dade County, Fla. "It's not just the idea of going out to have a drink. Now they are going out to get drunk." Linda Baron, a Miami drug-abuse specialist, says, "Sometimes we wonder which comes first: poor grades, poor relationships with families and low self-esteem, or teenage drinking problems."