[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 64 (Monday, May 22, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H3012-H3013]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           UNDERAGE DRINKING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OSBORNE. Madam Speaker, underage drinking flies under the radar 
screen for most people. Alcohol is legal and widely accepted by adults, 
and yet many times we do not realize the devastation that this is 
causing for young people.
  The average at which young people begin drinking is 12.7 years of 
age, and that age is declining annually.
  Binge drinking is something that is very common among young people. 
On average, teenagers drink more by double what adults drink per 
sitting and per consumption.
  Teens who start drinking before age 15 are four times more likely to 
become addicted to alcohol than someone who starts drinking at age 21 
or later.
  Prevention efforts have been, I would say, very minimal. The Federal 
Government currently spends about 25 times more annually to combat 
youth drug use than to prevent underage alcohol use.
  Alcohol is a gateway drug. Usually those who begin to use cocaine, 
heroin, and methamphetamine do not start with those drugs. They start 
with alcohol. Television ads for alcohol products outnumber 
responsibility messages by 32-1. In other words, those ads that promote 
the consumption of alcohol are 32 times more prevalent than those ads 
that urge restraint, responsible drinking or discourage underage 
drinking. From 2001 to 2003, the industry spent $2.5 billion on 
television advertising and promoting their product and only $27 
million, a mere fraction, on responsibility programs.
  Underage drinkers currently account for 17 percent of all alcohol 
sales in the United States, and that is a huge margin. In my State, 
Nebraska, underage drinking accounts for 25 percent of all alcohol 
sales, and of course, those sales are all illegal.
  Recent studies have found that heavy exposure of the adolescent brain 
to alcohol interferes with brain development. In other words, drinking 
at age 10 is qualitatively and quantitatively different than drinking 
at 21 or 25 or 30 or 35 or whatever because of developmental aspects.
  This is a brain scan showing a brain scan of two 15-year-old young 
men. The scan on the right is a 15-year-old male, heavy drinker, a 
binge drinker, the person who is sober at the time of the brain scan, 
drinks regularly, binge drinker. The 15-year-old young person brain 
scan on the left is someone who is an abstainer, someone who does not 
drink at all. These young people were asked to perform memory tests, 
and you see the brain scan on the right showing minimal brain activity, 
as compared to the young person doing the same memory test on the left. 
So we see what excessive exposure to alcohol does to brain function.
  Many young people drop out of school, who do not perform well in 
school, are simply people who are heavy drinkers. An estimated 3 
million teenagers are full-blown alcoholics at the present time, and 
that is about six times more than those who are addicted to other kinds 
of drugs.
  Alcohol kills six times more young people than all illicit drugs 
combined, all other illicit drugs. Underage drinking costs the United 
States roughly $53 billion annually. So this is something, again, that 
I mention that ofttimes people are simply not aware of.
  The bill that we have introduced in the House that we think is 
relevant to this problem is called the Sober Truth on Preventing 
Underage Drinking Act, the STOP Act, and what it would do is create a 
Federal Interagency Coordinating Committee to coordinate efforts

[[Page H3013]]

directed at underage drinking. Right now, we have multiple programs 
aimed at different types of substance abuse alcohol is one of those. 
Some of those programs are in the Department of Justice, some are in 
Education, some are in Health and Human Services, but there is 
practically no coordination of these programs. Sometimes they duplicate 
each other. Sometimes these programs do not work well, and so we feel 
there needs to be some coordinating commission that coordinates all of 
these programs, particularly those that are aimed at alcohol abuse by 
young people.
  It also authorizes a national media campaign directed at adults. You 
say, well, why would you direct it to adults. Well, the main thing is 
that the attitude of parents is the number one predictor as to whether 
a young person will abuse alcohol as an underage drinker or not, and so 
many parents many times feel if a young person is using alcohol, that 
pretty much prevents them from being involved with heroin or cocaine or 
methamphetamine, when exactly the opposite is true. Someone who starts 
abusing alcohol at an early age is much more apt to be addicted to all 
kinds of substance, and therefore, we feel there is a lot of drug 
awareness that has to occur with drugs.
  It also provides additional resources to communities and colleges and 
universities to prevent underage drinking. At the present time, 
annually 1,700 young people, college students, die each year on the 
college campus because of alcohol abuse. It is the leading cause of 
death on the college campus. This is double the rate that we have had 
for deaths in Iraq. So we feel that this is critical.
  Also, it increases Federal research and data collection on underage 
drinking.

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