"In a study of more than 10,000 15- and 16-year-olds, British researchers found that teens with larger allowances were more likely to drink frequently, binge or drink on street corners and other public places.

The large majority of the teenagers in the study - 88 percent - had tried alcohol at some point. But risky drinking was particularly common among teenagers with more pocket money, presumably because they were better able to buy their own alcohol.

About one-third of teens in the survey said they bought their own alcohol, and they were six times more likely than their peers to drink in public places, three times more likely to drink frequently and twice as likely to binge on a regular basis.

The findings suggest that parents could help curb problem drinking by keeping tabs on how their children spend their money, according to lead study author Mark A. Bellis, of Liverpool John Moores University.

"A recent study finds that student drinking - a perennial campus problem - is getting worse, and officials of area colleges are stepping up efforts to curtail it.

...'Students know about the movie 'Animal House,' and that's what they think they're supposed to do at college,' lamented Lori Lambert, director of residence life at Xavier University.

The study, by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, found that 3.8 million full-time college students - 49 percent - binge drink and/or abuse prescription and illegal drugs and that 1.8 million full-time college students - 22.9 percent - meet the medical criteria for substance abuse and dependence. That's more than twice the percentage of the general population.

The survey saw no significant change from a dozen years ago in the percentage of students who drink, but it discovered that the intensity of excessive drinking has jumped sharply. Between 1993 and 2001, the proportion of students who frequently binge drink increased 16 percent, those who drink on 10 or more occasions in a month went up 25 percent, those who got drunk at least three times a month increased 26 percent and those who drink to get drunk was up 21 percent, the study found.

Among the consequences of alcohol abuse on college campuses were 1,717 deaths from alcohol-related injuries in 2001, up 6 percent from 1998, and a 38 percent increase from 1993 to 2001 in the proportion of students injured as a result of their own drinking.

The report said there was a 21 percent increase from 2001 to 2005 in the average number of alcohol-related arrests per campus and noted that in 2005 alcohol-related arrests constituted 83 percent of campus arrests. In 2001, 97,000 students were victims of alcohol-related rapes or other sexual attacks and 696,000 students were assaulted by a student who had been binge drinking."

With good reason, health and educational officials are worried about the effects of heavy binge drinking among the nation's high schoolers.  According to the authors of a new study on the problem, "Heavy episodic drinking among young people is increasingly perceived as an important social problem."  The magnitude of the problem is suggested by a 2000 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in which researchers documented "a heavy episodic drinking prevalence...of 26.2% among 10th graders in a two-week time frame."  Accordingly, the authors of the new study-all public-health scholars from the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island Hospital, or Brown University School of Medicine-set out to identify the social and personal characteristics that foster or prevent this problem.

Parsing data collected from 938 Arkansas students enrolled in the 9th, 10th, and 11th grades, the researchers discern some clear patterns.  Students who report heavy episodic drinking are disproportionately "older, male, from families that receive welfare benefits, are not living in intact families, are attending religious services less often, and are more likely to have delinquent friends than those who have not drunk heavily in the month prior to the survey."

In simple bivariate statistical tests, students living in an intact family are almost half as likely to binge drink as peers not living in an intact family (-46%; p < 0.01).  The protective effect of living in an intact family declines in a more sophisticated multivariate statistical test that takes into account age, sex, welfare receipt, and other background variables, but it is still sizable and significant (-32%; p < 0.05).

Though the effect is smaller than that of family structure, strong attachment to parents also predicts less vulnerability to heavy episodic drinking.  Compared to peers without such attachment, students who reported a strong attachment to their parents were between one-fourth to one-fifth less likely to binge drink (-26% in simple bivariate analysis, p < 0.01; -22% in sophisticated multivariate analysis, p < 0.05).

No doubt, health educators will do their best to combat the problem of binge drinking among adolescents.  However, until Americans end the national retreat from marriage and the national epidemic of divorce, tens of thousands of distressed and rootless young people will continue to take dubious comfort from a bottle.