That's the latest message from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University and its president, former Carter Administration cabinet member Joseph Califano. CASA's anti-alcohol "research" and its laughable conclusions appear in the latest issue of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Yesterday, CASA declared that "one half of the alcohol consumed in this country [consists of] underage and excessive adult drinking," a claim that is -- to put it kindly -- at odds with reality. In order to arrive at this overblown statistic, CASA researchers defined an "excessive" adult drinker as anyone who consumed more than two drinks per day. CASA has made no attempt to account for recent science from Harvard and Tulane showing that two drinks per day can reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes by 30 percent.

In an editorial accompanying CASA's study, JAMA notes that the activist group's invented standard for "excessive" drinking "differs from the drinking limits used to screen patients for alcohol disorders." JAMA also chided Foster for neglecting to consider "the timing and patterns of drinking, variations in individual alcohol metabolism, and body mass" as well as whether or not "alcohol is consumed with food" when labeling consumers as "excessive" drinkers.

In a feeble bid to explain their choice of a two-drink cutoff for "excessive" behavior, the CASA study's authors note that the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services recommend "no more than 1 drink a day for most women and 2 drinks a day for most men." But these are calorie-counting guidelines, and have nothing to do with substance abuse.

CASA's new research is just the latest in its series of ill-informed, agenda-driven, and poorly executed efforts to demonize alcohol consumption in the United States. Last year, CASA was embarrassed when a similarly flawed study, which falsely claimed that underage drinkers accounted for 25 percent of all alcohol consumption, was publicly denounced by countless respectable media outlets. The true figure was determined to be 11.4 percent, or less than half CASA's exaggerated number.

At the time, CASA defiantly refused to back down, insisting that they should have raised their estimate to "30 percent or more." This week's release puts the number at 19.7 percent -- raising the fair question of whether CASA really has a clue about what the real percentage is. (This month we gave CASA a 2002 "Tarnished Halo" -- the "Don't Drink and Number-Crunch" award -- for its duplicity and willful distortion.)

CASA, says the Associated Press, is "attempting to correct botched statistics they released a year ago," but this year's edition is equally suspect. The New York Times reported this morning that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that CASA "took a C.D.C. survey of high school drinking and 'inappropriately' assumed that everyone from 12-year-olds in junior high school to 20-year-old college juniors had the same drinking rate."

It's sloppy work like this that made the Washington Times declare on this morning's editorial page that CASA has a "proven disdain for the facts." The editorial also takes the organization and its leader to task for ignoring the fact that alcohol abuse among teens is on a sharp 20-year decline. "If excessive alcohol consumption shows steady decreases," the Times asks, "then who needs Mr. Califano?"

Predictably, the anti-alcohol establishment is glossing over CASA's manifest errors, and insisting on a raft of social reforms to correct the "problems" somehow indicated by a decline in teen drinking and the civilized tradition of wine with dinner. Califano is telling Reuters that alcohol is "a premier drug of abuse in America." CASA is demanding new warning labels on beer and wine, and a $1 Billion industry-funded slush fund (what they call an "independent foundation") to fund groups like CASA.

Join Together Online (JTO), a neo-prohibitionist Boston University project that's run by former MADD public-policy Vice President (and current Board Member) Ralph Hingson, is using CASA's latest study to call for new, higher taxes on all adult beverages. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) also weighed in this morning in support of using this flawed study to mandate additional "sin" taxes.

Interestingly, JAMA disagrees. The editorial accompanying CASA's study suggests only one remedy for Americans' problems with over-consumption, and it's not more taxes. "Primary care physicians," says the AMA, "should increase efforts to identify patients who are drinking to excess, [and] conduct brief interventions for those who simply need to cut down... The process for screening and intervention is quick and easy to incorporate into routine visits."

JTO director David Rosenbloom appears unfazed by the AMA's recommendation and CASA's history of pulling fast ones over an unsuspecting public. Rosenbloom says in a news release that it simply doesn't matter "whether the federal government's official estimate of 11.4 percent [alcohol served to minors] is right, or the JAMA study is right with its 20 percent figure." Like CSPI, all he cares about is making beer, wine, and spirits more expensive, and funneling the tax revenues into more self-styled "prevention" projects like his own.