Source: Oakland Tribune Contact: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 Section: Page B1 Author: William Brand, STAFF WRITER WHY BOOZE PUSHERS ARE LOSING SLEEP Health may be a key reason BERKELEY Heavy drinking by white men has plunged dramatically in the last decade, apparently because of new concerns about health, a University of California, Berkeley alcohol research team says. The number of white male heavy drinkers those who consume five drinks or more in a single sitting at least once a week dropped from 20 percent in a 1984 survey to 12 percent in 1995. An equally startling discovery shows that while heavy drinking among AfricanAmerican and Latino men has remained constant, a growing percentage of minority men and women of all ages have quit using alcohol entirely. Fully 55 percent of AfricanAmerican women and 57 percent of Latina woman do not drink at all. Among AfricanAmerican men, 36 percent don't drink, up from 29 percent in 1984, the study found. Among Latino men, 35 percent no longer drink, up from 22 percent from a decade earlier. Abstinence by whites has increased, but only slightly 39 percent of women and 26 percent of men the researchers said in a report presented Monday at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in Indianapolis, Ind. Percapita consumption of alcohol, especially high alcohol spirits such as whiskey and vodka, has been dropping since the early 1980s, said study arthors Raul Caetano, director of the Alcohol Research Group at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, and Katherine Clark. The study of 6,000 Americans across the nation in 1984 and again in 1995 is the first to track drinking by ethnic background. However, drinking statistics for Americans of Asian and American Indian descent were not reported. Reasons for the changes aren't clear, Caetano said in an interview Tuesday. "There's no hard evidence, but people are exercising more. People are drinking bottled water and juice. There are juice bars everywhere. "We speculate that maybe the majority population has also become a little more conscious of the harm of excessive alcohol consumption," Caetano said. "There's been an ongoing prevention effort. Also the legal drinking age has changed from 18 to 21 and that has had an impact." He suggested that drinking patterns are duplicating are smoking less, but others are not. A switch to drugs from alcohol is more prevalent in high school than among those of legal drinking age, be said. Although deadly binge drinking on college campuses has been in the news recently, the study dealt primarily with frequent, heavy drinkers someone who has five or more drinks in one sitting at least once a week and more moderate users. The study indicates that in many ways, Americans of different ethnic backgrounds still live in widely different societies, he said. Among white males 50 to 59, frequent, heavy drinking consumption of more than five drinks at one sitting at least once a week plunged to 3 percent from 19 percent in 1984. Among white males 18 to 29, heavy drinking sank to 16 percent from 32 percent in 1984. Heavy drinking by AfricanAmerican males stayed the same 15 percent. And among Latinos, the percentage rose a point to 18 percent. There was a 5 percent drop to 16 percent among African American men 50 to 59, but a constant 16 percent of Latino men of that age continued to drink heavily.