Underage Drinking Issues by Daniel Cucher The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse released a 145 page study claiming that children drink 25 percent of all alcohol consumed in the United States. In response to this shocking statistic, CASA recommends higher alcohol taxes, a ban on television alcohol advertising and that the White House Office of Drug Control Policy include alcohol in its media campaigns. The report is titled "Teen Tipplers: America's Underage Drinking Epidemic," and it is the most recent propaganda to come out of America's army of misguided moralists. In its attempt to create national outrage at underage drinking, CASA has drastically inflated the actual figures. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, which conducted the survey, underage drinkers account for not 25 percent, but 11.4 percent of all alcohol consumption in the United States. So how can CASA cite this survey and so dramatically misrepresent its findings? The group failed to correct for the disproportionate number of teens sampled in the survey. While 12- to 20-year-aids represent only 16 percent of the U.S. population, teens accounted for 38 percent of those surveyed. Thus, the percentage of underage drinkers in the country is actually less than half of what CASA reports. Essentially, the alcoholic beverage industry is enduring the same kind of attack that the tobacco industry has fought for years. And although I don't expect billion-dollar lawsuits against brewers and distilleries, I foresee television ads aimed at discouraging underage drinking -- and I have a big problem with this. We've seen how government-manipulating, public-interest organizations play with statistics to justify their existence, and it's time taxpayers stop paying for their expensive advertising spots. I don't believe for a moment that anti-smoking ads will prove effective in the long run. And I'm even willing to accept that the ads, which make smoking appear...