ALCOHOL
Alcohol is the drug that is consumed by the greatest number of users?and by a considerable margin. Roughly two-thirds of the American population age 12 and older (in 1994, this figure was 67 percent) say that they have used alcohol once or more in the past year; 54 percent did so in the past month; and in 1993, just over one in five (21.5 percent) say that they drank once a week or more during the past year (HHS, 1994a, p.119; 1995a, p.85). The "Monitoring the Future" study of secondary, high school, and college students and young adults also shows high levels of alcohol use. Nearly half of eighth-graders (47 percent for 1994) had consumed alcohol in the past year, and nearly a fifth (18 percent) admitted having being drunk at least once during that period of time. Half of high school seniors (50 percent) said that they had drunk alcohol in the past month; over seven out of 10 college students (72 percent) and noncollege young adults (70 percent) had done so (Johnston, O'Malley, and Bachman, 1994, pp.85, 162; 1995, p.43).
Sales of alcohol average out to roughly 2.3 gallons of absolute alcohol per person for the population age 18 or older per year, or just under one ounce per person per day (Williams, Clem, and Dufor, 1994, p.15). This means that the American population as a whole consumes about 60 to 70 billion "doses" of alcohol per year. (Keep in mind that distilled beverages are 40 to 50 percent alcohol, wine is 12 percent, and beer is about 4 percent; thus, how much alcohol is consumed in a given quantity of a beverage has to be calculated from its potency.) However, there is great variation from one person to another in the amount of alcohol consumed. There is a kind of polarization in use: While one-third of the American population is made up of abstainers, and over half are moderate or "social" drinkers, that very small one-tenth of the population which is made up of the heaviest drinkers imbibes more than half the total alcohol consumed. Thus, the category "drinker" or alcohol "user" represents an extremely mixed bag. It should be emphasized that the concept "alcoholic" is extremely controversial; different experts define it radically differently, and the field cannot agree on how many alcoholics there are in the population (Hilton, 1989). However, taking as our handy working definition of addiction the use of a psychoactive substance on a frequent, repetitive, and compulsive basis to the point of physical or psychological dependence, one researcher estimated that there are between 10 and 15 million alcohol addicts in the United States today (Goldstein, 1994, pp.7, 263).
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