‘I like beer’

As depicted in movies such as Dazed and Confused and detailed in testimony during Brett Kavanaugh’s infamous Senate hearing, heavy drinking was common among teens in the 1970s and ’80s. As cheesy as they may have been to the Gen X target audience, ads from MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) can be credited with a decline in teen drinking. Their programs worked—data from the National Institutes of Health show that while 17 percent of 12th-graders were binge drinkers in 2015, that is a massive decrease from the 41 percent of binge-drinking seniors in 1979.

Still, alcohol is one of the most widely available and commonly used drugs among teens. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, excessive drinking is responsible for more than 4,300 deaths among underage youth each year and people age 12-20 drink 11 percent of all alcohol consumed in the United States, with 90 percent of that booze in the form of binge drinking.