Classes take on ads for alcohol

Project aimed at middle schoolers

As a lawyer, Mary Easley squared off with bad guys she sent to jail. As North Carolina's first lady, she is picking a fight with Captain Morgan and a buxom robot with a keg of Heineken stashed in her chest.

Easley intends to keep young people from drinking by pummeling the alcohol icons with straight talk. In a program she announced Wednesday, North Carolina teachers will tell middle schoolers that beer brewers are lying to them.

In coming years, middle school students will learn how to unravel the slick alcohol ads that inundate their televisions, computers and magazines. Can that woman really weigh 100 pounds if she is chugging 2,000 calories worth of rum and Coke a day? Will popping the top of a beer bottle really act as a cattle call for gorgeous men?

"We can't control how much they see," Easley said as she rolled out a lesson plan due to start arriving in middle schools by January. "Advertising is endemic in our culture."

Easley's is not a new fight, but it is a relatively fresh approach. Instead of targeting high schools and colleges, where many students already drink, educators should focus on children just as, studies show, they are on the cusp of being tempted to take their first sip of alcohol. The average age for the first use of alcohol in the United States is now 14, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In 1965, the average age was 17 1/2.

Experts on teen drinking put stock in the program's approach.

"Middle schoolers are much more susceptible to messages from their teachers and parents than are high school and college students who are driven to a far greater degree by peer influences," said George Hacker, director of the Alcohol Policies Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C. "And middle schoolers are just at the age of initiation when it comes to drinking; it's almost too late to start talking about drinking with high school and college students."

Early exposure is a serious problem, experts say. A teen who takes a sip of alcohol before age 15 is five times as likely to develop an alcohol problem later in life.

The new alcohol awareness program has been in the pipeline since 2005. A research and training firm in Durham crafted a lesson plan; Chapel-Hill-Carrboro City Schools and Chatham County Schools tested the program over the past two years.

The bottom line: It took. Mostly with boys. Researchers concluded that boys, more than girls, didn't like being duped and shunned the alcohol ads when they spot the manipulation.

Alex Moore, an eighth-grader at Guy Phillips Middle School in Chapel Hill, said he can't believe how convincing the ads were before he took the class.

"Once you turn 13, you automatically get smarter," Alex said. "Before that, you just get led along."

It is a wild path on which they're led. Images bombard children so quickly some parents don't even notice:

NASCAR vehicles adorned with beer logos; rap songs rhapsodizing Cristal champagne; the alcohol-related billboards found along so many roads; the neon signs in the front windows of most bars; the beer commercials that have become as much a part of sports as the games themselves; and the "teen comedies" such as the recent hit "Superbad," which follows two high school students who think girls will like them if they can get their hands on some alcohol.

Although the number of alcohol ads in magazines has declined since 2001, TV ads have almost tripled, to 147,476 in 2005. A fifth of those ads are aired during shows that lure teens: "Hogan Knows Best," "Insomniac Theater" and "Strip Search." In 2004, children watched an average of 196.6 television ads for alcohol, according to a report presented to the Federal Trade Commission.

The ads tend to be working. Sixth- and seventh-graders with high exposure to alcohol ads were 50 percent more likely to drink than peers watching fewer ads, the nonprofit research group RAND Corp. found in a recent study.

Austin Dickson, an eighth- grader at Holly Ridge Middle School in Holly Springs, said he doesn't pay attention to the ads for alcohol that fill the sports programs he watches. He added, however, that he does like a spot for Bacardi rum set in a club and "a commercial for Coors light beer that, if I didn't know about the negative effects, might persuade me that drinking is positive."

"A Bacardi rum ad," his mother, Christine Dickson, remarked later. "How does he remember that?"

Dickson said she monitors her son "very closely" and has had "many discussions" with him about alcohol. Still, she hasn't given much thought to all the alcohol ads her son sees. "I just tune them out," she said. "But I guess he isn't. I know what I'm telling him but hadn't really thought about what they were. Now I will."