Drink wisely -- taught by whom?

Whether the legal drinking age is 18, 21 or something in between, at some point the odds are better than even that eventually a young adult is going to have that first drink. About 61% of American adults 18 or older said they've had alcohol in the last year, according to a 2006 national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For the most part, lessons in how to drink come through experimentation with excess, essentially trial and error, exploring how much can be consumed, as young people go through what has become a rite of passage to adulthood.

"It's a forbidden-fruit sort of thing," says Brenda Chabon, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Montefiore Medical Center, New York. "We haven't done a good job on educating kids. We kind of demonize alcohol on one hand and embrace it in another way."

With ignorance as a guide, the long-awaited rite of passage too often ends up with mangled cars and ruined lives.

But whose job is it to teach responsible drinking? Middle and high schools have their hands tied, says Robert Turrisi, professor of biobehavioral health at the Prevention Research Center at Pennsylvania State University. "School-based programs teach abstinence only," he says. "Schools can't legally teach how to do illegal behaviors."

Beginning in elementary school, students are given the simple message that drugs, including alcohol, are forbidden and bad, a message that often conflicts with what they see at home -- parents having a cocktail before dinner or a glass of wine with the meal. If statistics are proof, the anti-alcohol messages have little effect on kids' drinking. A CDC survey last year found that 45% of high school students drank some alcohol in the 30 days before the survey, 26% binge drank, 11% drove after drinking and 29% rode with a driver who had been drinking.

Once kids step on a college campus for the first time, they're surrounded by new freedoms and temptations. The largely ineffective "just say no" message is likely to go right out the window. So lessons in moderate and responsible drinking are up to parents and, increasingly, colleges.

Lessons from home