If Drugs Worry You, Look at Alcohol Toll

It’s 11 o’clock, Irvine. Do you know where your priorities are?

A statistical earthquake--in the form of a survey on your children and their drinking habits--hit your community last week and caused barely a ripple.

Where are the yellow ribbons? The bumper stickers? The mass rallies? The call to arms?

The only official reaction I’ve heard--although I’m sure the survey was discussed elsewhere, probably over cocktails--was from the City Council, which accepted the report and decided to schedule public meetings about the issue at some future date.

Certainly not an over reaction, I’ll say that.

I think someone’s confused here, and I don’t think it’s me.

The fact is that the body count and other human wreckage from booze will be 10 to 20 times that of illegal drugs.

More people will die from booze than drugs, more people will kill or be killed from booze than drugs, more families will be destroyed, more jobs lost, more bankruptcies declared, more jail time spent, more severe illness caused, more children psychologically maimed.

The survey, conducted by the city’s Substance Abuse Task Force among 7,826 youngsters in grades seven to 12, showed that more than 75% of the high school juniors and seniors had consumed alcohol in the last six months. More than a third identified themselves as “frequent drinkers.”

About half of the students said they had been intoxicated before the age of 15; more than 42% said they had either driven while drunk or had been passengers in cars that had drunks at the wheel.

Where do they get the booze? The same place you do: liquor stores, grocery stores, restaurants and at home.

National statistics show (depending on whose estimates you accept) that 900 to 1,564 of these youngsters will become full-blown alcoholics. Some already are.

Of that group of predestined alcoholics, those who control their drinking until adulthood will then have five to 15 years before their lives cave in on them, before the disease batters them into submission, according to the American Psychiatric Assn.

By contrast, “an adolescent can become an alcoholic . . . in six to 18 months (my emphasis) of heavy drinking,” says an association pamphlet entitled “Substance Abuse.”

And what kind of life can they expect, assuming they do not become one of the 200,000 people ages 15 to 25 who the National Alcoholism Council predicts will die in alcohol-related traffic accidents in the next 10 years (about four times the number of U.S. deaths in the entire Vietnam War)?

I discussed that issue with Jack Platt, coordinator of clinical services for the substance abuse treatment program at Capistrano by the Sea Hospital in Dana Point. What, I asked, would he tell one of the young drinkers if he had the child sitting in front of him?

“If you aren’t killed in a car crash, I can tell you your life will be utter chaos,” Platt said.

“Before it’s over, you will go down and take at least four people with you. Your life will never be stable. There’s a good chance you will also become dependent on drugs. In terms of any real meaning, your life will be empty. It will be a total wreckage in every department--relationships, vocation, finances, health.

“The most utter hopelessness you can imagine.”

OK, so what can the community, the schools, the parents do? Well, the old thinking was that nothing could be done to help an alcoholic until he or she was ready for aid, and that usually meant until they woke up on Skid Row or in jail, sick and tired of being sick, and did something for themselves--checked into a hospital or called Alcoholics Anonymous.

Now we know that’s not true. We know that education works, and we know that intervention works. And, maybe even more importantly, we accept alcoholism as a disease, probably of genetic origin.

Proof that education has an effect is demonstrated in the Irvine survey. More than 25% of the students said they know that they should cut down on drinking or even that they should stop. More than 40% said they worried about their drinking, which convinces me that somewhere along the way they have learned something.

But the home is an important key to that education and also to prevention, according to psychiatrist Edward Kaufman, one of the nation’s recognized experts on the subject.

Kaufman, chief of UC Irvine’s Chemical Dependency Service and co-editor of the enormous Encyclopedic Handbook of Alcoholism, admitted that it may sound simplistic, but close family ties--meaningful communication with your children--are essential to make any dent in the problem.

“We find significantly less abuse in what we call ‘intact’ families, families in which there is a close association between parents and siblings . . . where kids listen to their parents,” he said.

Parents must be alert to early warning signs, he said: growing isolation of the children, a breakdown in communication, substance abuse among peers or older siblings. Also, they can’t be afraid to set limits and stick to them.

And, if there is a history of drinking problems in the family, it is essential that the family dialogue starts early.