Drink on it: what the U.S. can learn from Europe

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Europe is way better than America.

Don’t get me wrong.

I love my country, but Europe has been looking down its refined nose at kid-brother USA since Shakespeare was spouting sonnets while the Aztecs were cutting hearts out.

It’s no secret that in recent years the United States has been winning all of the wrong global races, from obesity and heart disease to incarceration and teen pregnancy.

But several recent tragedies around the nation and close to home have called my attention to another major discrepancy, one that’s easy to fix.  
Alcohol-related deaths.

American culture thrives on sensationalism. We worship our celebrities, adore juicy scandals and are magnetically drawn to anything taboo.

As teenagers, sex, drugs and alcohol form an unholy trinity that beckons with the allure of forbidden fruit: against the rules but within our reach.

Lowering the national drinking age is a debate that has taken a back seat to others in the past two elections, but a quick glance at the drastic difference in statistics between America and many European countries indicates an issue that desperately needs revisiting.

In 2011, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that during a given month, 39 percent of teens consumed alcohol, 22 percent binge drank, 8 percent drove after drinking and 24 percent rode with a drunk driver.

All of those numbers contribute directly to the annual number of alcohol-related deaths.

Unsurprisingly, America takes the cake there, too: 1.6 per 100,000 people every year.
In 2010, 10,228 people were killed in alcohol-impaired car accidents — over one-third of all traffic-related deaths in the U.S.

In Europe, where most nations have a drinking age of 18 or younger, the alcohol-related death statistics are much lower.

About 0.9 per 100,000 people die of alcohol-related incidents in Ireland, 0.3 in Greece and 0.2 in Italy.

Recent research published by the World Health Organization found that while 15- and 16-year-old teens in European nations where the drinking age is 18 or lower — and mostly unenforced — drink more frequently, they are dangerously intoxicated far less often than their American counterparts.

All of this data throws the United States’ flawed approach to promoting safety into stark relief.

Individuals drink at ages 16 and 18 anyway, but because they’re doing so illicitly and relatively informedly, the hype of the act causes more accidents.

In Europe, the hype doesn’t exist: young adults can legally drink in their teens, so even though they drink more in aggregate, they injure themselves and others far less.

We should normalize alcohol and integrate drinking naturally into everyday culture.

By treating alcohol as something to be neither idolized nor abhorred but simply enjoyed in moderation — like the Europeans do — the underage abuse rate would fall, and the alcohol-related death rate would follow.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated in 2006 that 17,941 people died in alcohol-related collisions, nearly half of total traffic deaths in the United States. A statistic like that commands our attention.

I love America. I love the Fourth of July, I love Thanksgiving and I’ve sung the national anthem at countless home games in high school.

But when it comes to protecting young adults from themselves, we’re failing miserably.

Denial is not the answer. Information always is.

— sbkissel@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Sarah Kissel on Twitter @QueSarahSarah_.