e are not all of the suspected causes of underage drinking, they are the most prominent and accepted among scholars. What we all--parents, educators, lawmakers, and legislators alike--must realize is that America’s youth is at risk, there is an alcohol problem, and there is a solution. If we all work together, we will find it, we will make a better future, and we will help America’s youth persevere.Drinking is an age-old problem. In the United States in the 1820’s, author Nathaniel Hawthorne recalled his classmates at Bowdoin College drinking fluid from their alcohol lamps to skirt campus prohibitions. Decades later, anti-saloon activists helped to pass Prohibition in 1919 by circulating pictures of children sneaking alcohol out of taverns (Clark 224). The question at hand is what do we have to do? In the past twenty years there has be an entourage of alcohol deferment and resistance education, yet the problem still exists. Obviously this single-sided education is not working. What we need is a multi-facetted program that encompasses parents, children, and awareness groups, while toughening laws and initiating state crackdowns on the underage consumption of alcohol.Some may argue that such a program already exists; a program called D.A.R.E. . The D.A.R.E. program spans some twenty-five million students in 250,000 classrooms nationwide (Gordon 72). The principal idea behind D.A.R.E. is to educate children how to say “NO!” to drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately, studies conducted by the Justice Department, as well as independent researchers have shown that D.A.R.E. “has had no statistical effect on drug [or alcohol] use by youngsters” (Gordon 72). The D.A.R.E. program often begins in kindergarten and, in some school districts, runs through high school. However, the program’s core curriculum is crammed into a mere seventeen short hours of instruction per classroom year (Gordon 72; Seb...
