Trends, Products Making Underage Drinking Easier

Keeping alcohol out of underage is a difficult task to begin with, but trends, fads and new products are making that task even harder.

That was the message Michelle Nienhius, Prevention Consultant with the Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services brought to a recent meeting of the Steppin' It Up Coalition.

Some young people will do anything to get their hands on alcohol, which leads to very dangerous and potentially deadly situations.

New trends in drinking include eyeballing – putting a shot of alcohol in your eye.

“There's videos out there of people putting it in their eye,” Nienhius said.

There's Chilly Willies – sucking alcohol up your nose.

Some even soak tampons in alcohol and then insert them.

Drinking hand sanitizer? “Yes, it has happened,” Nienhius said.

She gave a presentation on those trends and fads and urged coalition members to be vigilant. April is Alcohol Awareness Month.

“There's always something new out there, with social marketing and social networking, that keeps us on our toes,” Nienhius said. “We have to be very cognizant about what's going on because if we as adults don't understand what's happening, you better believe that the kids know what's going on. You don't want to be left out in the dark. You want to have just as much knowledge as they do.”

Michelle Nienhius brought an array of alcoholic beverages with her as part of her presentation, and urged coalition members to visit their local grocery stores, convenience stores and party shops.

“Some of this stuff is very, very hard to recognize – is it an alcoholic beverage or not?,” Nienhius said.

Once the beverage is out of its container, recognizing it as alcoholic becomes even hard.

“For instance with the (hard) lemonade here – it looks exactly like lemonade,” she said. “When you pour some of these drinks into a cup, they look exactly like fruit punch, Gatorade, orange soda … drinks that we drink on a daily basis.”

Many beverages come in containers that contain 4 or 5 standard drink servings, Nienhius said.

“Very, very potent,” she said. “You've got 12, 22, 32, 40 and 60 ounce containers.”

The new container sizes encourage greater consumption, she said.

She called Four Loko “a binge drink in a can.”

A can of Four Loko is 24 ounces, a can of beer typically 12 ounces. Four Loko has 12 percent alcohol by volume. A beer typically is 5 percent alcohol by volume.

Four Loko and similar drinks are pop-tops, she said.

“That tells me I'm supposed to drink it right away, right?” Nienhius said. “You don't pop a pop-top, drink a little, set it in the fridge and then go back to it two days later.”

After receiving criticism, Four Loko company officials have announced that they're changing to screwtop cans.

Some drinker even funnel the high-alcohol drinks, Nienhius said. Funnel allows drinkers to consume high volumes of alcohol in just seconds.

“It's bad enough potentially drinking that much, but funneling a Four Loko?” she said. “Yeah, they pretty much hit the ground.”

“Cocktails in a pouch” are easy to transport and hard to detect at glance, she said.

Companies are marketing alcoholic whipped cream, popsicles and ice cream.

Some companies sell their products in metal bottles – indistinguishable from metal water bottles once the label is removed.

“It used to be people could say, well, you know it's liquor when it's in a glass bottle with a metal screwtop,” Nienhius said. “Not anymore.”

Some companies are appealing to childhood nostalgia – adult chocolate milk and Hello Kitty-branded wines, for example.

Underage drinkers either come up with clever ways to hide their alcohol or buy products designed to do just that online.

Nienhius showed examples of soda cans, flip-flops, binoculars and even bras modified to hide booze.

“You go into the concert as a D cup and come out as an A cup,” she said.

Information on drinking games, including Beer Pong, are readily accessible on the Internet, with no age restrictions set up to keep the info from young people.

“Power Hour” is a popular game where drinkers take a drink every minute for an hour – leading to alcohol poisoning or even death.

Alcohol and energy drinks are a dangerous mix.

“For awhile the alcohol companies we're actually prepackaging the two together, and they were selling a prepackaged alcohol energy drink,” Nienhius said. “Thank goodness, the heat got turned up on that and now that is not legal, they cannot do that. But the train's already left the station. The phenomenon is already out there, that it's fun, cool, whatever, to mix alcohol and energy drinks. You can only imagine how dangerous a concoction that can be.”

The combination mixes a stimulant and a depressant together, she said.

“How's the body going to react to that?” Nienhius said. “You don't know. Everybody reacts a little bit differently.”

One danger is that stimulants extend the drinking time by keeping drinkers awake.

Alcoholic drinks are heavily marketed via social networking.

“And who's on social networking all the time?” Nienhius said. “Our young people.”

Screening processes on beverage websites are not very effective, she said.

“A lot of these age verification systems aren't foolproof whatsoever,” Nienhius said.

Underage drinking not puts kids at risk in the short-term, it threatens their futures.

Youth who drink before the age of 15 are four times more likely to develop alcohol dependence and 2.5 times more likely to become alcohol abusers than those who wait until age 21, Nienhius said.

“We know if we can delay folks from using, we can lessen the chance that they're going to have issues of alcohol dependency as they get older and later in life,” she said.