Dangers Of Alcohol

2 Pages 603 Words

We've all seen these or similar distressing headlines. Case in point --- newspapers across the country carried frightening statistics reported by Joe Califano and the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA).

On national television programs, Califano reported horror stories of alcohol abuse among college students, associating it with assault, rape, and even murder. A CASA report asserted that



"60 percent of college women who have acquired sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS and genital herpes, were under the influence of alcohol at the time they had intercourse"

"90 percent of all reported campus rapes occur when alcohol is being used by either the assailant or the victim"

"The number of women who reported drinking to get drunk more than tripled between 1977 and 1993"

"95 percent of violent crime on campus is alcohol-related."1


But relax. These assertions are not supported by the facts. According to an investigative reporter, one of these statistics "appears to have been pulled from thin air," another is based on no evidence whatsoever, another is based on one inadequate survey and is inconsistent with all other surveys, and a fourth is highly suspect at best. 2 (See reference #2 for additional specifics.)





Even the most improbable of statistics are often repeated by news media as fact and become part of public belief. It is now commonly believed that the average young person will have seen 100,000 beer commercials between the age of two and eighteen But just think --- sixteen years or about 5,844 days occur between a person's second and eighteenth birthday. To see 100,000 beer commercials in that period, a person would have to see an average of more than seventeen a day! Common sense alone should have been enough to dispel the myth. But this clearly absurd statistic has been gullibly repeated over and over:


by the Center for Science in the Public Interest in the New York Times,

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