Summer House

WASHINGTON (AP) — Many of the nation’s estimated 10.8 million underage drinkers are turning to their parents or other adults for free alcohol.

A government survey of teens from 2002 to 2006 said slightly more than half had engaged in underage drinking.

Asked about the source of alcohol, 40 percent they got it from an adult for free over the past month, the survey said. Of those, about one in four said they got it from an unrelated adult, one in 16 got it from a parent or guardian and one in 12 got it from another adult family member.

Roughly 4 percent reported taking the alcohol from their own home.

"In far too many instances parents directly enable their children’s underage drinking — in essence encouraging them to risk their health and well-being," said acting Surgeon General Steven K. Galson. "Proper parental guidance alone may not be the complete solution to this devastating public health problem — but it is a critical part."

The nationwide study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, being released Thursday, tracks the social contexts involved in underage drinking, a problem leading to thousands of alcohol-related traffic deaths and injuries each year.

About one out of five of those aged 12 to 20 — or roughly 7.2 million people — said they had taken part in binge drinking, defined as consuming five or more drinks on at least one occasion in the past month, the survey said. Rates were significantly higher if they lived with a parent who engaged in binge drinking.

The study, which uses data from the National Surveys on Drug Use and Health, is based on a scientific random sample of 158,000 people aged 12 to 20 in the United States. Among the other findings:

• Over half of current underage alcohol users were at someone else’s home when they had their last drink, while 30.3 percent were in their own home. About 9.4 percent were at a restaurant, bar or club.

• About 3.5 million teens aged 12 to 20 each year meet the diagnostic criteria for having an alcohol use disorder, such as dependence or abuse.

• Among younger teens, slightly more girls reported drinking than boys did. In the middle teens, they drank at roughly the same rate. Among 18 to 20-year-olds, boys outpaced the girls.

• Rates of underage drinking and binge drinking were slightly higher at the opposite ends of the economic spectrum.

• Rates of current and binge alcohol use among 12 to 20 year olds were higher in the Northeast and Midwest than in the South or West.

• Rates of alcohol use disorder among those aged 12 to 20 was higher for American Indians or Alaska Natives (14.9 percent) than for whites (10.9 percent), blacks (4.6 percent), Hispanics (8.7 percent) and Asians (4.9 percent).

"This report provides unprecedented insight into the social context of this public health problem and shows that it cuts across many different parts of our community," said Terry Cline, administrator of SAMHSA. "Its findings strongly indicate that parents and other adults can play an important role in helping influence — for better or for worse — young people’s behavior with regard to underage drinking."

Lindsay Lohan has checked into rehab, she said in a statement Wednesday. "I have made a proactive decision to take care of my personal health," she said. "I appreciate your well wishes and ask that you please respect my privacy at this time." A source close to the actress tells PEOPLE: "Lindsay is in a very positive frame of mind and is looking forward to making a positive change in her life."

Lohan, 20, has been filming the thriller I Know Who Killed Me, and a rep for the movie tells PEOPLE production had already been on hold due to Lohan’s recent appendix surgery. It’s uncertain when filming will resume. "I Know Who Killed Me, like all films, has insurance," says the rep. "In Lindsay’s case, she has a good 13-hour work day. The character she plays requires a good deal of physicality and she’s not yet healed (from her surgery) and not yet ready to return." In December, Lohan’s rep told PEOPLE the actress was attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Later that month, Lohan revealed that she had been in AA for a year, and said she feels better when she’s not drinking. "I was going out too much and I knew that, and I have more to live for than that," she told PEOPLE. But Lohan had previously dismissed critics who said she was going out too much. In November, she told Oprah Winfrey that she is not a party girl, adding, "Is it a crime to go dancing with your friends?" Over the summer, James G. Robinson, CEO of Morgan Creek Productions, blasted her for being absent from the set of her movie Georgia Rule and blamed her "heavy partying" for the behavior. Lohan’s mother Dina quickly shot back, saying Robinson was "way out of line." Lohan was briefly hospitalized at the time for being "overheated and dehydrated," according to her rep.

Brad Renfro, the former child star whose later career was hampered by drug and alcohol problems, has been found dead at his Los Angeles home. He was 25.According to reports, Renfro’s body was discovered at 9am yesterday. The cause of death has yet to be determined, although the actor is believed to have been out drinking with friends the night before his death. "He was working hard on his sobriety," Renfro’s lawyer Richard Kaplan said yesterday. "He was doing well. He was a nice person."

Raised by his grandmother in Knoxville, Tennessee, Renfro was plucked from obscurity at the age of 12 to star alongside Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones in the 1994 blockbuster The Client, based on the bestseller by John Grisham. The following year he won the Hollywood Reporter’s "young star" award. Renfro went on to enjoy a fitfully successful acting career with a starring role in Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil and supporting turns in the likes of Sleepers, Bully and Ghost World. He recently completed work on the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Informers, in which he stars alongside Winona Ryder and Tommy Lee Jones. But Renfro’s career was often overshadowed by his off-screen trials. In May 2006 he served 10 days in jail after attempting to buy heroin from an undercover police officer in LA’s Skid Row area. More recently, Renfro claimed he was making efforts to stay clean. "I’m tired of paying the consequences," he said.

An evaluation of alcoholism treatment suggests more ways to define success than strictly total abstinence. The method may help provide some changes to traditional approaches, the results of a case study suggest. "It may be argued that subjects who remain abstinent [from alcohol] during treatment are the most successful because psychosocial functioning and physical health depend on sobriety," say study authors Sue-Jane Wang, Ph.D., and Celia Winchell, M.D., and colleagues from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Rockville, Md. "However, other patterns of drinking are very common during treatment and many analytic approaches fail to make a distinction among the patterns." "For example, traditional research methods often don’t distinguish between a person who drinks only once a week during a 12-week trial and one who abstains for the first 10 weeks but spends the last two weeks intoxicated, according to the study.

These summary measures fail to capture the full complexity of the drinking pattern over time," the researchers say. The authors said, "There has been a great deal of contention on whether the effects of alcoholism treatment should be evaluated solely against the criterion of abstinence. The clinical community is still searching for a better description of what constitutes effectiveness in alcoholism treatment trials. More informative statistical analysis methods are necessary to arrive at meaningful evidence."

According to a Center for the Advancement of Health report, "Wang and colleagues tested a research tool called the ‘multiple failure time’ approach that asks more nuanced questions than traditional approaches, including: ‘Does the treatment reduce the rate of relapse to heavy drinking?’ They used this approach to re-examine a study that found weakly statistically significant evidence that an alcoholism treatment drug called naltrexone was effective." By taking into account both the time and the frequency of the study participants’ drinking episodes, the researchers noted two things that were overlooked in the first analysis: The risk of having any drinking episodes and any heavy drinking episodes was significantly lower in the group treated with naltrexone rather than a placebo, the report said. Source: The study results were published in the March 2003 journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.