Drug Programs Should Start With No. 1 Problem: Alcohol

Red Ribbon Week is over now, but despite its very decent goal of discouraging drug use among kids, I don’t feel optimistic.

Take my campus, for example. We are so caught up in self-righteous platitudes about the evils of heroin and cocaine that we tend to overlook the students’ No. 1 drug of choice: alcohol. It’s easy for kids to swear off drugs they’re never tempted to use. But if high school communities started taking a serious look at the way students use and abuse booze, no one would feel quite so complacent.

Some universities are finally having to deal with the problem because of highly publicized student deaths from alcohol poisoning. But let’s face it, binge drinking behavior doesn’t start in college. Alcohol use among high school students is epidemic and knows no neighborhood boundaries. Many of the same students involved in Red Ribbon Week activities will be putting away enough Colt 45 and vodka screwdrivers come Friday night to put themselves at risk.

Nobody kids around in class about shooting up, but jokes abound when it comes to who drank how much over the weekend. If a teacher half listens to the talk before class, it’s not hard to get the picture. Even whispered, the words “fake ID,” “wasted,” “hammered” and “kegger” come through clearly in the Monday morning air. Nor can we soothe ourselves with the comforting thought that these are somehow problem kids. Students who drink in high school cover the spectrum, from song leaders to baseball players, from band members to honor students.

Even if we can agree that there is a lot of underage drinking, the response is far from outrage. Kids will be kids, right? We can’t follow them around, and besides, they could be using worse substances. Many parents are so relieved that their kids aren’t into hard drugs, they tend to turn a blind eye to the weekend micro brews. But let’s get real. A lot more kids die as a result of drinking too many beers than from marijuana or cocaine use.

There are any number of problems that alcohol can create for young people, but the fact that mixing it with driving can kill them is what’s most scary. There’s a reason for the legal drinking age in this country. To learn to control a machine as powerful as an automobile is challenge enough without adding an inexperienced drinker to the picture. That is one reason many European countries with a younger drinking age also have an older driving age. They know that beginning both activities at the same time is crazy.

To allow our children to attend functions or go on vacations where we know there’s going to be drinking is asking for trouble. If put in a situation where there’s alcohol, most high school kids aren’t going to “just say no.” They’re going to drink. Once they’re at the party, it’s too late to mull over the issue.

Even if your children go to the after-game function and drink soda, they still may be part of an atmosphere that encourages other kids to drink and perhaps do something stupid. If they watch a friend down four beers and go out and climb into a Jeep, the fact that they weren’t drinking will be little comfort to anyone if the kid in the Jeep or some innocent bystander winds up dead.

If young folks are routinely around alcohol, there is an excellent chance that someone is going to drive drunk or end up a passenger in a car with someone who has no business being behind the wheel. They may make it home safely; a lot of them do. But it only takes one incident to alter lives forever.

We can wring our hands over the sad stories and gruesome photos in the newspaper, but we’d be better off taking a long, hard look at what our kids are doing and whether we, as parents, should just say no.

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Christine Baron, a high school English teacher in Orange County, is co-author of “What Did You Learn in School Today?” You may reach her at educ@latimes.com or (714) 966-4550.