April is Alcohol Awareness month.

It was heartening to see that, despite a snowstorm, more than 100 parents showed up for a town meeting on underage drinking this week in Douglas County, Nev., the same area where no parents showed up for a symposium on teen drug use last week. The poor attendance at the latter event led to an excellent editorial, "Parents Must Be Involved," that was posted on the home page of The Record-Courier'.

About 1,200 town meetings about underage drinking, in fact, were held around the country last week, funded by grants from SAMSHA.

Awareness for this issue is growing, and not a moment too soon.

We were cleaning out our 1993 Taurus station wagon today because it's being donated to charity on Monday. Duncan has been using the car for the past six months. I found a beer bottle cap in the well. He claimed he had no idea where it came from, but he was sure that it wasn't his.

"It must be a friend's," he said.

I gave — perhaps yelled is a better word — a lecture about need to have the guts to tell his friends that they could not ride in the car if they were going to drink. The consequences are that he cannot drive with any passengers for a month, and I expect him to spread the word why. If I just took away driving privileges, I don't think the real reason why would get out there. If I do find out that he has had a passenger — and word tends to get around in this small village — he'll lose his driving privileges for two months.

I'm more worried about teens having a few beers and driving than I am about them using heroin like Carrick did. Most will resist the latter; few have the gumption to tell their friends not to drink. It's part of the culture, particularly among jocks like Duncan's buddies. I found a story about the Duke lacrosse team in today's New York Times both insightful and disturbing. A black woman who was hired to be an exotic dancer at a team party has charged that three players raped her. According to the Times:

"A lot of people are saying, 'That's awful, but not a complete shock,' " said Mike Van Pelt, the sports editor of The Chronicle, Duke's student newspaper. "They go out a lot, drink a lot. Rowdy party behavior is not uncharacteristic."

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You'll notice, starting today, that our site is carrying some public service advertising banners. They will rotate in the top right corner. The first is a link to a petition that you can send to your local representative asking them to "Get Serious About Alcohol Policies That Save Teens Lives." The second in a link to the Silent Treatment: Addiction in America website, which went live this morning. I'll be writing more about this project in the future but, in a nutshell, I am writing the lead article for a five-part series that will be available free to newspapers across the country starting in August, and Carrick will be blogging on the website beginning May 1.

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Finally, Happy Birthday, Jim Jude, my main man. No joke (but I'm thinking of a few).

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