Heavy episodic drinking on college campuses: does changing the legal drinking age make a difference?

OBJECTIVE: This article extends the compartmental model previously developed by Scribner et al. in the context of college drinking to a mathematical model of the consequences of lowering the legal drinking age. METHOD: Using data available from 32 U.S. campuses, the analyses separate underage and legal age drinking groups into an eight-compartment model with different alcohol availability (wetness) for the underage and legal age groups. The model evaluates the likelihood that underage students will incorrectly perceive normative drinking levels to be higher than they actually are (i.e., misperception) and adjust their drinking accordingly by varying the interaction between underage students in social and heavy episodic drinking compartments. RESULTS: The results evaluate the total heavy episodic drinker population and its dependence on the difference in misperception, as well as its dependence on underage wetness, legal age wetness, and drinking age. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that an unrealistically extreme combination of high wetness and low enforcement would be needed for the policies related to lowering the drinking age to be effective.

Space-time visualization and analysis in the Cancer Atlas Viewer.

This article describes the Cancer Atlas Viewer: free, downloadable software for the exploration of United States cancer mortality data. We demonstrate the software by exploring spatio-temporal patterns in colon cancer mortality rates for African-American and white females and males in the southeastern United States over the period 1970-1995. We compare the results of two cluster statistics: the local Moran and the local G*, through time.. Overall, the two statistics reach similar conclusions for most locations, although where they disagree reveals some interesting patterns in the data. There are only two persistent clusters of colon cancer mortality, and these are clusters of low values.