By the time teens reach their senior year in high school, most, if not all of them have experimented with alcohol, tried it with friends or on a dare, many drink with some regularity and a significant percentage of so-called “troubled” teens are also involved in the misuse of alcohol and become substance abusers, drinking frequently, habitually, heavily and in quantity. Teenage drinking and alcohol misuse  may also be more problematic than previously imagined. Drinking or use of alcohol by teens are more strongly associated, unlike the use of illicit drugs and other substance dependencies, on sociability than with antisocial behaviour. Attempting to control teens and their consumption and use of alcohol should focus less on prevention of initiation and withholding them from alcohol and more on prevention of misuse. When faced with teens and alcohol, use, abuse or misuse an important coping strategy and approach is needed, directing the lives of teens as impressionable adolescents to better informed and wise choices, reinforcing the positive traits that are currently hiding in them, mastering how to deal with peer pressure and/or negative influences as it relates to them being solicited, taunted and/or dared to experiment with drugs and/or alcohol.

    Measures of alcohol use and misuse are more strongly associated with social activities such as dating and partying than with delinquent and related behaviors such as theft, burglary, and running away from home. The opposite is true of hard-drug, cannabis, and cigarette use.

    If efforts to reduce the ill effects of teen alcohol use are to be successful, they must take into account its key characteristics--its prevalence and its social context. Unfortunately, it is also true that school-based prevention programs aimed at helping younger adolescents resist peer pressures to drink alcohol, have only short-lived effects or work for only a small subset of youths.  Instead of trying to stop all consumption of a drug used almost universally among teens, prevention efforts might more profitably focus on misuse of alcohol, albeit in connection with teen social life. And they should pay particular attention to the most prevalent forms of high-risk drinking behavior--binge drinking, drinking and driving, and polydrug use.

    To ensure long-term reductions in teenage drinking, stronger parental, community, and societal efforts to reinforce prevention messages are clearly needed. Such efforts could range from closer parental supervision of adolescents' parties to combating media images that associate drinking with good times, popularity, and glamour.

    Schools, camps and treatment also continue to be intervention possibilities available for teenagers who use, abuse or are addicted to alcohol.