Under the Influence : Despite Years of Warnings, Alcohol Is Still Teens' Drug of Choice

By JOHN NEEDHAM

March 26, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

For Bill and Janet Collier, the phone call that every parent fears came at 3 a.m. There had been an accident. Their 17-year-old son, Brandon, was dead.

At nearly the same time the same day, Feb. 14, calls were going out to the families of Joe Wilson and Denny Spradlin, too. The messages were the same: Your son is dead.

Brandon Collier died in the Riverside County community of Indian Wells when the BMW convertible he was driving, its top down on a warm winter night, rolled over at least three times. His 16-year-old friend and fellow Los Alamitos High School student, Garrett Van Cleve, a passenger in the car, was killed too. Another teen-age friend riding as a passenger was injured.

Wilson, 22, and Spradlin, 20, died in Huntington Beach. Police said Spradlin made anti-Vietnamese statements to a group of Vietnamese in a liquor store. One of the Vietnamese went out to the car, got a gun, and killed the two.

Two separate incidents within 25 minutes of each other, 100 miles apart, and four people dead. A link between the two: alcohol.

Riverside County investigators said autopsies put Collier’s blood-alcohol level at .19 and Van Cleve’s at .16. Under California law, a reading of .10 is legally drunk.

Huntington Beach police said Wilson and Spradlin had left a party to buy more beer. Wilson had a blood-alcohol reading of .12 and Spradlin was described as drunk at the time of the quarrel, although blood alcohol tests have not been completed, police said.

Despite two decades of rhetoric against marijuana, cocaine and other drugs, despite a nationwide campaign against drinking and driving that has been going on for years, alcohol remains the No. 1 drug of teen-agers, according to teen-agers, parents, school officials and experts on drugs. The drinking age may be 21. The preaching may come from parents or pastors. But the drinking continues.

Various local, state and federal surveys indicate that alcohol “continues to be the major substance of choice among youth,” said Joan Bissell, who has studied youth and alcohol consumption for the state and federal governments and who is now assistant director of UC Irvine’s office of teacher education.

The surveys show that alcohol “continues to be used by a strikingly high proportion of youth at surprisingly young ages,” Bissell said.

The last 20 years have seen a “very significant increase” in teen-age drinking, Bissell said. “No question about that.

“This generation of youth is involved in the use of alcohol to a degree which can be termed epidemic. That simply was not the case 20 years ago.”

Why the increase?

“Alcohol is the most readily available of the substances,” she said. “Teen-age drinking has become part of the youth culture. Many youths observe their parents drinking. A very large number of youths believe that almost all other youths are drinkers. And they express the opinion that it is necessary for them to drink in order to be socially accepted.”

That is true, said Anthony Hale, a 17-year-old senior at Garden Grove High School who estimated that about 250 of the approximately 400 seniors at his school drink on occasion.

“They’ll go to a party, and they’ll have a drink,” Hale said. “Or someone is with a friend, and the drinks are there and everyone is drinking, so they’ll feel like they have to, to be in.”

Molly Mazur, a 15-year-old freshman at Orange High School, said she “started socially drinking at the end of last year.” She said her schoolmates drink for a variety of reasons.

“Some people just drink to mellow out,” she said. “And some drink to get ripped and forget their problems. . . . And, I don’t know, there are people that think it’s cool to drink, I guess. And they drink one cooler and they say they’ve had four and they pretend to pass out. . . . It looks stupid to me, but they think it looks cool.”

Wine coolers, the blend of wine and carbonated water that has become one of the marketing success stories of 1980s America, are a favorite alcoholic beverage of young drinkers, according to teen-agers, teachers and youth counselors.

James F. Mosher, director for alcohol policy at the Trauma Foundation in San Francisco, said wine coolers have had “a massive amount of advertising to promote a product that has been characterized or marketed as something that is a healthy beverage, ideal for all kinds of social situations that young people are likely to find themselves in.”

Mosher, whose Trauma Foundation is a nonprofit organization that works to prevent accidental injuries through educational and other programs, said the sweeter taste of wine coolers makes it easier for young people to get accustomed to the beverage, “unlike other alcohol.”

“Though the (manufacturers of wine coolers) won’t say it’s aimed at teen-agers, I think people who are being candid will admit that teen-agers make up a large part of the market,” Mosher said.

Whether it’s the folksy “me and Ed” oldsters rocking on a porch or youthful California sun-worshipers toting surfboards in the advertisements, the promotion of wine coolers, with an emphasis “on health and young love and the exciting appeal of it . . . has really created an environment that is difficult to overcome in terms of getting a public health message across that in fact wine coolers are alcoholic, they are a drug, they can be a problem,” Mosher said.

Sam Folsom, spokesman for the Wine Institute in San Francisco, which represents California wineries, said the organization gets “a lot of calls” complaining about ads for wine coolers aimed at youngsters. Folsom said the institute revised its advertising code last May to include wine coolers and make them subject to “fairly specific and strong requirements” that teen-agers not be targeted by the ads.

Although teen-agers say the wine coolers have proved popular, beer still remains the alcoholic beverage most often consumed.

A state attorney general’s office survey published in May, 1986, reported that by the 11th grade--junior year of high school--69% of the students had drunk beer within the previous six months. More than half, 53%, had drunk wine or alcohol in the previous six months. Of ninth-graders, 61% had drunk beer and 44% wine or alcohol in the previous six months.

In Orange County, a survey done for the county Health Care Agency in the fall of 1983 found similar results.

Two-thirds of the students surveyed reported having tried beer or wine before they were 10 years old. Although most may have experienced only a sip, 19% reported having been intoxicated by beer or wine. By the 11th grade, 69% of the students said they had become intoxicated at least once from alcohol.

In Washington, Health and Human Services Secretary Otis R. Bowen in January released the results of a 1987 survey of high school seniors across the country, reporting that 97% had mentioned “some experience” with alcohol, 66% had used alcohol in the past month, about 5% drank daily, and 37.5% had consumed five or more drinks on one occasion within the previous two weeks.

“None of these figures has shown any improvement in the last three years,” investigators who worked on the survey said. Bowen said the figures indicated that “one area that calls for special attention is alcohol abuse.”

There are some hopeful signs, experts said, but they still amount to little more than pencil-thin shafts of light in a near-total gloom.

Surveys “indicate there is some decline of alcohol abuse among youth,” according to Bissell of UCI, who heads a program to make drug- and alcohol-abuse education as much a part of elementary school as the three Rs.

Susan G. Zepeda of the Orange County Health Care Agency said that, in recent years, there “appears to have been a slight drop in teen traffic fatalities,” a development that while “too soon to call . . . a trend . . . is a step in the right direction.”

Marti Heuer, director of the Youth and Family Recovery Center in La Palma, which treats young alcohol and drug abusers, said that in sharp contrast to the situation 15 or 20 years ago, there now is “just so much support out there for kids who want to assess their own alcohol and drug abuse” and take corrective action.

In addition, she said, there is “peer pressure, pressure on to ‘just say no.’ ”

Despite those faint rays of hope, “there is still an attitude out there that as long as your kid is drinking, it is OK,” Heuer said. There is a tendency for people to have the attitude that “drugs are bad and alcohol is OK.”

“Alcohol is still the No. 1 abused drug in the nation,” Heuer said. “That has not changed over the years.”

For Joe Wilson’s family, his killing was the third tragic death in the family in less than two years, and the second linked to alcohol.

Wilson, 22, was the only one of the quartet killed Feb. 14 who was legally old enough to drink in California. In March, 1986, his brother Tai was killed in a motorcycle accident. Eight months later, on Nov. 28, 1986, his brother Nuu Soloi, 39, was killed in a traffic accident while riding a bicycle. The Orange County coroner’s office said there was no evidence that Tai Wilson had been drinking. But Nuu Soloi registered a blood alcohol reading twice the limit at which a motorist in California is considered intoxicated, the coroner’s office said. And police said Soloi bicycled through a red light and was struck by a car.

Joe Wilson’s funeral services in Huntington Beach came hours after the memorial Mass for his friend since childhood, Denny Spradlin, and at the same time as the service in Whittier for Brandon Collier.

A friend of Collier’s parents, Sandra Case, stood outside the chapel after the service and shook her head.

“At that age, kids think they’re invincible,” said Case, mother of a 20-year-old son and an 18-year-old daughter. “They have no fear. They just go and do things without thinking. . . . They’re just spontaneous.” Echoing the generations-old lament of parents, she said, “I wouldn’t want to ever go through teen-agehood again with my children.”

Inside the chapel, filled with a diffused sunlight filtered first through smog and then through stained glass, the Rev. Charles E. Ensley Jr. told hundreds of mourners the message Brandon Collier’s parents wanted them to carry away with them:

“Don’t drink and drive, no matter what your age.”

THE WARNING SIGNS

Experts warn that, taken individually, many of the warning signs of alcohol abuse by a youngster are not much different than typical adolescent behavior. In combinations, however, any of the following signs could indicate problems with alcohol or drugs.

Wears sunglasses at inappropriate times.

Becomes more and more secretive.

Sells personal belongings.

Skips school.

Grades drop.

Odor of alcohol in room or on clothes.

Alcohol- or drug-related graffiti on notebooks, etc.

Cash is missing from your wallet or purse.

Minor valuables disappear from home.

Overreaction to criticism.

Wild mood swings.

Changes in speech.

Changes in friends.

Problems with police.

Increasing absences from home.

Verbal or physical threats to family.

Source: National Council on Alcoholism

TEENS AND ALCOHOL

Responses from a 1983 survey of 6,682 students in Orange County schools concerning alcohol use, divided evenly among 7th-grade, 9th-grade and 11th-grade students.

LIQUOR

Students who used alcohol in the previous six months:

7th grade: 24%

9th grade: 50%

11th grade: 59%

Students who used alcohol at least once a week:

7th grade: Less than 2%

9th grade: 7%

11th grade: 10%

7th grade:

9th grade:

11th grade: