Medicine: Drink & Man at Yale

Most alcoholics are problem drinkers before they get to be hospital cases, and most are moderate drinkers before they get to be problem drinkers. Why do they drink at all, in the first place? To try to answer that question, Yale University researchers polled 17,000 students in 27 colleges of all types across the U.S. From a carefully worded questionnaire, designed to strain out flip replies by sophomore jokesters, Researcher Robert Straus reports these findings:

¶ The great majority of college students who drink started to do so before they got to college (men, 80%; women. 65%).

¶Young people’s habits are more influenced by what their parents practice than by what they preach: if both parents drink, 90% of their sons and 83% of their daughters drink; if both parents abstain, so do 49% of their sons, 81% of their daughters.

¶ Family income is a big factor: from families with less than $2,500 a year, 66% of men students and only 30% of women are drinkers, while from families with more than $10,000 a year, the figures are 86% and 79%.

¶ Beer is the usual drink of 72% of college men, but only 47% prefer beer—the others drink it because they cannot afford hard liquor.

¶ Though veterans report more experience with alcohol than nonveterans, they settle down to the same drinking habits. The Yale survey will pay its biggest dividends in years to come, when the students are re-polled every five years to find out the effect of alcohol, if any, on their lives. Researcher Straus is so young (29) that he expects to be around for quite a few rounds of quizzes.