San Jose Mercury News (CA)

IT'S TIME TO PROTECT TEENS BY TARGETING ALCOHOL ADS
MERCURY NEWS EDITORIAL

November 8, 2003
Edition: Morning Final
Page: 7B

The Marlboro Man and Joe Camel are gone from the airwaves, but the Coors twins and the Labatt bear have become fixtures on TV, hawking another product that is lethal and illegal in the hands of teens.

A new study out of Georgetown University found that a substantial amount of beer ads on TV and in magazines reach an underage audience, despite industry standards that prohibit marketing to kids. It also found that the industry's ''drink responsibly'' commercials are more likely to be seen by parents than by the teens they are supposed to reach.

And it found that drinking is too often promoted in films aimed at teens. Last weekend's top grossing film was ''Scary Movie 3'' which features the sexy Coors twins. The movie is rated PG-13.

For years, the alcohol industry has policed itself, banning ads that feature young-looking models or explicit sex. But the Georgetown study shows it's time for independent oversight.

The National Academy of Sciences recently found that teen drinking costs more than $50 billion a year, including $19 billion for traffic accidents. A National Institutes of Health study last year linked drinking on collegecampuses to 1,400 deaths, 500,000 injuries and 70,000 sexual assaults annually.

Yet public efforts to keep kids from drinking pale compared with campaigns against tobacco and illegal drugs. The feds spend only about $70 million a year to teach kids about alcohol abuse, compared with $1.8 billion on drug abuse and $100 million on smoking.

Alcohol is a legal product, so the government can't ban those party-hearty ads. But if advocates can show that the industry is intentionally targeting kids, expect the kind of congressional hearings and class-action lawsuits that pushed the tobacco companies into a settlement severely limiting advertising.

Efforts are under way to get the industry to pay for prevention, which the National Academy of Sciences recommends.

Last year, Assemblywoman Wilma Chan, D-Oakland, proposed taxing alcohol producers to fund youth alcohol prevention and recovery centers. Her bill never made it out of committee, but Chan plans to reintroduce it in January. With the new research and a growing awareness of the youth alcohol problem, the Legislature should take a closer look at it this time.