A 17 year old teenager finds himself facing a major felony after biting and suffocating his mother, because she refused to let him drink.

This is an interesting attempt at a legal defense. A 30-year-old Northern California woman, Deborah Towe, faces 11 felony counts including unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, oral copulation of a person under the age of 16, committing lewd acts upon a child and arranging a meeting with a minor for a lewd purpose. But it was all for her daughter!

In a special supplement to Pediatrics, edited and sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), physicians will have access in one place to the reviews and analyses of current research on biological, behavioral, and environmental changes during childhood and adolescence that foster the initiation, maintenance, and acceleration of illegal use of alcohol by underage youth.

Efforts to halt underage drinking often focus on peer pressure and the prevention of risky behaviors, but the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is undertaking a new federally funded project to give middle-school children a science-based understanding of what can happen to them if they use alcohol.

In 1984 the legal drinking age in the U.S. was raised from 18 to 21 in all 50 states. That was in response to the number of drunk driving fatalities involving young people nationwide. But that has not stopped young people from drinking.