Underage drinking is worth nearly US$23 billion a year to the alcohol industry, or 17.5 per cent of all money spent on spirits in the United States annually, researchers from New York's Columbia University report.
And abusive drinking by both underage people and adults may account for nearly half of all money spent on alcohol each year.
"What we see here is that there is a large conflict of interest for the alcohol industry between profitability and public health," Susan E. Foster of The National Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia told Reuters Health.
She and her colleagues used information from four national studies, including a total of 260,580 people aged 12 and older, to estimate the value to the alcohol industry of underage drinking, as well as the value of abusive and dependent drinking.
Just over one-quarter of underage drinkers met standard criteria for alcohol abuse and dependence, Foster and her team found, compared to 9.6 per cent of those 21 and older.
Underage drinking and alcoholism are tightly linked, Foster noted. People who start drinking before age 21 are twice as likely to become addicted to alcohol, while the risk of becoming an alcoholic is four times greater among those who begin drinking before their 15th birthday.
The researchers estimated the value of underage drinking as US$22.5 billion, while adult abusive drinkers accounted for US$25.8 billion.
Together, the value of underage and abusive drinking was US$48.3 billion, or 37.5 per cent of the total. Using a different dataset, the value was estimated at US$62.9 billion, or 48.8 per cent of all money spent annually on alcohol.
"What happens is that the alcohol industry maintains or increases consumption, as in any other industry, by bringing in new customers or by increasing the amount consumed by their existing customers," Foster said.
"Early initiation of alcohol use supports the industry in both ways."
In their report in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Foster and her team call for nationwide regulation of alcohol advertising and marketing, noting that exposure to such ads has been directly linked to underage drinking.
(China Daily 05/04/2006 page6)
