Living: One Less for the Road?

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Some youngsters mix large amounts of alcohol with other drugs. "They may go up all night on cocaine and get racing, then later on use alcohol to come down and get to sleep," says Kevin McEneaney of Phoenix House, a Manhattan drug- free center. "They may also use alcohol to mask other drugs. Drinking is more respectable than putting powder in your nose." Illinois State Trooper Bob Campbell says teenagers often cover drugs by having a drink before driving. If they are stopped by police, the blood alcohol level will be too low to result in arrest.

In the minds of many youngsters, bars are still where the action is. "For the unattached, the singles who are still looking, there are few viable alternatives to pubs," says Roger Dunham, a sociologist at the University of Miami, Fla. "Even though there is a general trend toward temperance, there is something about a pub--the drinking, the relaxation."

Heavy drinking is now a serious problem at stadiums and sports arenas. Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, who has been searching for a way to crack down on drug use by players, has talked of refurbishing baseball's "family image," a polite way of saying that something must be done about a new type of fan turning up at ball parks: the loutish young male who sloshes beer on other fans, starts fistfights at random and hurls objects from the stands. The Pittsburgh Pirates have set aside "family sections," where no beer is allowed. The Seattle Mariners have 3,500 family seats at the Kingdome.

Stadium owners, reluctant to lose money by banning beer, have responded with an assortment of other palliative efforts. Veterans' Stadium in Philadelphia hires off-duty police to roam the stands and see that drunks are cut off. The Capital Centre in Landover, Md., provides free rides home for the inebriated, sometimes for those unwilling to go. Boston's Fenway Park no longer allows vendors to hawk beer in the stands, and set a two-beer limit at concession counters. Many parks, like Shea and Yankee stadiums in New York, stop selling beer after the seventh inning to let woozy fans sober up for the trip home.

In response to public pressure, police are taking a tougher stance. The Los Angeles police department has a driving under-the-influence task force, and Florida's Dade County has a 22-officer police squad assigned to patrol solely for drunk drivers. In New Mexico, police are authorized to confiscate driving licenses on the spot if the driver is under 18 and measures .05% blood alcohol content on a breath test. Adults must have twice that score to qualify as drunk, but, says a state spokesman, "the idea is that a juvenile is more impaired at .05 than an adult is at .10." In some states, police routinely set up "sobriety checkpoints," stopping cars to check for drunk drivers. Maryland has a program encouraging CB operators to call in reports on drunk drivers. Since July 1982, more than 20,000 such reports have yielded almost ( 3,000 drunk-driving arrests. Says Kent Milton of the California highway patrol: "The problem is still enormous. It's a gigantic ocean with a lot of fish and very few fishermen."