This State Report is required by the Sober Truth on Preventing (STOP) Underage Drinking Act (Pub.L. 109-422), enacted by Congress in 2006 and reauthorized in December 2016 as part of the 21st Century Cures Act (Pub. L. 114-255). The STOP Act requires an annual report “on each State’s performance in enacting, enforcing, and creating laws, regulations, and programs to prevent or reduce underage drinking.” As directed by the STOP Act, the State Reports were prepared by the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD), chaired by Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, Ph.D., the Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Time Period Covered by this State Report: This State Report primarily includes data from calendar year 2020 and 2021. Regional and state profile data were drawn from the most recently available federal survey data as of 2020. State legal data reflect the status of the law as of January 1, 2021. State survey data, collected in 2021, were drawn from the most recent 12-month period in which the states maintained the data.
Source of Data: For each state, overall population information was taken from 2010 Census data. Data about the portion of each state’s population comprising 12-to 20-year-olds, as well as facts about past-month alcohol use and binge use, were averaged from the 2017 through 2020 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), SAMHSA’s Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality (CBHSQ), and the NSDUH special data analysis (2021). Confidence intervals for these estimates are available from CBHSQ’s Division of Surveillance and Data Collection on request. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) application (updated May 2022) served as the resource for data about alcohol-attributable deaths from 2015–2019 among youth under age 21. ARDI was also the source for state-level data on years of potential life lost as a result of underage alcohol-related fatalities.
The National Center for Statistics and Analysis’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) provided the 2020 data used to present statistics about fatalities among 15- to 20-year-old drivers. State legal policy data were obtained from the following sources: 1) the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s Alcohol Policy Information System (APIS) website (https://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/); 2) legal research planned and managed by the ICCPUD.”