[woodruffw]

Associated, yes, but the causation is not clear: it could be the case that early drinking predisposes adolescents to alcoholism, or that adolescents who would be predisposed to alcoholism as adults are reflected in early drinking statistics.

These surveys are also done on American adolescents, who are more likely to obtain and consume alcohol illicitly than their European counterparts. It would be interesting to see comparative statistics on the two.

Finally: this bulletin mixes up different demographics: you have (1) COAs who are more likely to become alcoholics themselves, (2) adolescents who engage in binge drinking, which is generally correlated with alcoholism in adulthood, and (3) an unmeasured population of drinking-but-not-binging adolescents.