Day 1.029: Lies, damned lies...

One of the main differences between driving here and in the UK is that even local journeys tend to take place on multi-lane dual-carriageway roads (divided highways). In turn one of the differences between driving on such a road here and in the UK is that here they are often lined with advertising billboards.

One of the billboards I pass on my way into work at the moment contains the words "Don't serve alcohol to teens" and "It's unsafe. It's illegal. It's irresponsible."

Now, I am no great advocate of teenagers being allowed to drink alcohol, but I suspect that a balanced approach is best and wondered if the people who paid for this message were able to justify their three statement tag-line. Did I ever regret opening that can of worms...

The website is absolutely riddled with correlations being used to imply causation. This is one of the themes of the book How to Lie with Statistics - you can read some amusing examples here.

Here are some examples from dontserveteens.org:

• High school students who drink are twice as likely to have seriously considered attempting suicide, as compared to nondrinkers.
• Teens who drink alcohol are more likely than nondrinkers to smoke marijuana, use inhalants, or carry a weapon.
• Current teen drinkers are more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse within the past three months than teens who don't drink.

Now clearly, none of these things are exactly a good advert for teen drinking, but is it possible that depressed teens drink because they're depressed and teens who are inclined to rebel by breaking the law will break more than one and that young people who go to wild parties tend to both drink and have sex? I cannot imagine that parents giving their teenagers alcohol (certainly one of the groups this advert and website are targeting) are going to produce the same effects.

So:
unsafe? - possibly, but certainly not proven - except when driving which is probably encouraged if anything by forcing teens to drink without parental or other adult consent - and is an issue for all drivers, not just teens.

illegal? - sometimes, but it would seem not with parental consent in New York at least.

irresponsible? - maybe, but so is all this abuse of statistics.

One of my favourite comments was that fewer teens drink alcohol in the US than in other countries which proves that the law works - well yes, making something illegal generally discourages the majority of people from doing it. It doesn't follow that it is a sensible law.

Anyway, we had teens here tonight and some beer was consumed - but not by them. We played Rock Band with a full band of guitar, vocals, drums and bass all evening (various line-ups) it was very cool.