Drum roll please…
List below. Media release here.
1. Bud Light 27.9%
2. Smirnoff Malt Beverages 17.0%
3. Budweiser 14.6%
4. Smirnoff Vodkas 12.7%
5. Coors Light 12.7%
6. Jack Daniel’s Bourbons 11.4%
7. Corona Extra 11.3%
8. Mike’s 10.8%
9. Captain Morgan Rums 10.4%
10. Absolut Vodkas 10.1%
I live in France were children used to get wine with water at lunch till the dogooders started a wine is bad campaign.
It is lack of familiarity with alcoholic beverages that leaves statutorily debilitated young Americans vulnerable to easy inebriation as they try to access forbidden joy-juice, and sets ’em up for drunkenness once the Magic Switch is flicked on their 21st birthdays and they can purchase these consumable legally.
Just what the hell gives anybody to think that if one can’t be trusted to guzzle and behave continently at age 20 years and 364 days, he suddenly can hold his liquor one day later?
Cultures in which children and adolescents are given access to beer and wine and other alcoholic potables do not have the high rates of alcoholism we see in these United States. I grew up in a Sicilian-American family in farm country, where we had a small vineyard and we made wine. Neither wine nor beer nor even distilled stuff was denied us in family settings during our “underage” years, and the common cold remedy in my childhood was a small glass of the family Dago red mixed with lots of orange juice.
We all learned early in life how to sense a “buzz” coming on and its treacherous effect upon discrimination and coordination. Wake up with even a mild hangover at age 9 or 10 and your lifetime attitude toward inebriation seems to be more averse than if you don’t start sipping until you’re in your late teens or early twenties.
In college and grad school and the rest of my young manhood, I got sloshed precisely four times, each of those on beer (which I did not drink at home, and with the effects of which I was unfamiliar). Ain’t overindulged in ethanol since.
Enforced abstemiousness is an idiocy (as if Prohibition didn’t prove it forcefully enough). The early introduction of alcoholic beverages as a normal part of family and social life sets these intoxicants in a context such that incontinence in later life is less likely.
Just as a child can’t learn to walk if he’s not allowed to set foot to the floor, you can’t get even the beginnings of wisdom from denial of the ability to make your own choices.
When I got out to Kansas in grad school, Coors was extolled mightily as I was an easterner and had never tasted Colorado Kool-Aid.
I remember taking my first sip, blinking at my drinking companions, and saying:
“Hell, that’s just Rolling Rock.”
Bud light isn’t an alcoholic beverage really. You get more drunk eating a few apples.
“The companies implicated by this study as the leading culprits in the problem of underage drinking need to take immediate action to reduce the appeal of their products to youth.” As you point out, br1022, the companies are not “culprits”. “Culprit” derives from “culpa”, blame. The companies appeal to adults to buy their beverages; if underage people are attracted by the same advertising, the blame falls on the underage drinkers and their families, not the beverage companies — nor, to be honest, the tobacco companies.
Why bother compiling a list like this? The answer is in the press release: “[T]his report paves the way for subsequent studies to explore the association between exposure to alcohol advertising and marketing efforts and drinking behavior in young people.”
Shilling for research money.
Suppose the researchers could wave a magic wand and have conclusive data on all this already? It seems they already do. According to the press release, “The companies implicated by this study as the leading culprits in the problem of underage drinking need to take immediate action to reduce the appeal of their products to youth.”
How would they do this? Require that company ads portray consumers of their products as physically deformed social outcasts? It’s ridiculous. It’s shilling for research money.
When I was an underage drinker, it was:
1. Pabst Blue Ribbon 50%
2. Schlitz 30%
3. Old Milwaukee 20%
4. Coors 0% (nobody had ever seen any. See:
“Smokey and the Bandit)
I suspect that the underage liquors of choice are the ones out front and easiest to grab on a beer run.
Not much of a surprise that love-in-a-canoe beer accounts for better than 40% of such consumption.
Would young males guzzle such stuff if they knew it had originally been brought to market specifically for the purpose of appealing to calorie-conscious women?