After an inspiring three-year battle with pancreatic cancer, a friend of mine is gravely ill. Unable to do much except watch TV, Mitch followed the recent NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament with great interest. During a commercial break in one of the games, he turned to his wife, Sue, and said: "I want two things. One, to get better. Two, to have a beer."

He had just seen a beer commercial.

If he is able to have a beer one of these days — he's having a hard time processing plain water — it would probably be the first one Mitch has had since he was in the Army 35 years ago. It's obviously not the alcohol he craves, Sue says. It's the lifestyle that beer commercials promise. Mitch is a highly intelligent man who prides himself on his resistence to the Siren call of our consumer culture. Under normal circumstances, he'd no more fall prey to an alcohol advertisment than belly up to the bar and order a boilermaker. But alcohol ads aren't selling the buzz, they're selling the steak: good times, good friends, good health, good sex.

I was reminded of this when I read about a new study that analyzes different published data sets and concluded that between 37.5% and 48.8% of the industry's sales are to illegal underage drinkers or to adults who abuse or are dependent on alcohol. The combined value in dollars to the industry is between $48.3 billion and $62.9 billion in sales, according to the study published in the May 2006 Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It found that underage drinkers accounted for at least 17.5% of total consumer expenditures for alcohol in 2001.

"The alcohol industry has a compelling financial motive to attempt to maintain or increase rates of underage drinking," the authors, who are affiliated with the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), write. "Alcohol advertisements in magazines, for example, expose youth aged 12 to 20 years to 45% more beer advertisements and 27% more advertisements for distilled spirits than adults of legal drinking age. The same pattern of overexposure of children relative to adults with advertisements for beer and distilled spirits also can be seen in radio and television advertising. Furthermore, exposure of children and teens to magazine and television alcohol advertisements has increased, even more so for girls than boys, despite national reports calling for limits on advertising by the alcohol industry to children and teens younger than 21 years."

CASA president and CEO Joseph A. Califano, Jr., is calling for the federal government to take a more active role in regulating alcohol advertising.

"Self-regulation by the alcohol industry is a delusion that ensnares too many children and teens," he says.

The beer industry responds that underage drinking is at a "record low" and says that it spends $50 million a year in "responsibility" PSAs annually.

All I know is if a beer ad makes Mitch want to have a drink, teens haven't got a chance to resist the false promise of good times, good friends, good health, good sex.