College Drinking: Less Than You Think

Of course, there's still tremendous heartache.

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As soon as we got back from Charleston, I covered the case of a 19-year-old Alexandria boy -- sorry, I can't help calling him a boy because he's the same age as Ben -- who was charged with drunken-driving manslaughter in the death of his best friend in a horrible accident. The friend was in a coma for four months before he died in April. The kid on trial visited him in the hospital almost daily, according to court testimony. As I looked at the young boy-man on the stand in his ill-fitting suit, I thought the lump in my throat might never go down. Could one of my boys have been sitting there instead?

Then there was the Charlottesville mother of two boys who got 27 months in prison for having an underage-drinking party for her son's 16th birthday a few years ago. I spent the day with her and her son down in Charlottesville the weekend before she reported to prison. The son told me that he'd asked his sports-coaching stay-at-home mom to host the party -- and buy the beer and wine coolers. She agreed, under the condition that everyone spend the night. She collected keys. Nobody left or got hurt.

Her explanation for that "really stupid mistake" was that she knew they'd drink anyway, so she was trying to keep them off the roads and safe at home.

Uh-oh, know that feeling. Could that have been us?

Then, for a follow-up article, I talked to a Fairfax woman who lost her only child, a 17-year-old son, in a crash after an underage-drinking party she thinks was hosted by parents. She was a single mom. He was all she had.

I can't speak for other parents, but for my husband and me, the worry that kept us up at night during our sons' high school years was drinking, yes, but mostly drinking and driving. Drinking and staggering we thought we had little choice but to accept. After all, we're not the perfect role models. I'm Italian-born -- drinking a glass of wine with dinner is part of eating. My husband is British -- having a few drinks is part of life. We don't have drinking problems, though.

A couple of uncomfortable truths: When my husband was a lad in London, he used to order his pints at the pub in his school uniform. When I was a high-school kid in Northern Virginia and the drinking age in the District was 18, we used to hop across the Key Bridge to Georgetown to buy our beer.

But the line in the sand for us was drinking and driving. We just wouldn't abide it. "Call us anytime," we said. "We'll pick you and your buddies up, no questions asked. Just never drink and drive. And don't get in the car with anyone who has. Please." I don't think we were alone in reciting that mantra.

And guess what? There are signs that all that talking might be working.

Believe me, I don't minimize for one moment the unimaginable pain of a parent who has lost a child in an accident caused by a young drinker. I can't even comprehend a grief so deep. But the truth is, these kinds of life-destroying tragedies are happening less than they used to. I can't help finding hope in that.

Drinking and driving among teenagers "decreased spectacularly" in the two decades leading up to the late 1990s, according to a report on the Web site of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The number of accidents involving legally impaired drivers younger than 21 (any blood-alcohol level is illegal for the underage) dropped by 61 percent between 1982 and 1998, going from 4,393 to 1,714. Although overall drinking and driving in the United States decreased substantially in that period, the report maintains that the decline was led by drivers under the age of 21. Most of that drop took place between 1982 and 1992.