Tobacco and alcohol advertising has always been an important issue in today's society especially because of the affect it can have on today's adolescents. Even today alcohol is the number one choice for youths of America. For example, "twenty-four percent of eighth grader, forty percent of tenth graders and fifty-one percent of twelfth graders reported a past thirty day alcohol use, as contrasted with ten percent of eighth graders, nineteen percent of tenth graders and twenty-three percent of twelfth graders who reported use of marijuana within the same thirty day period." (J. Unger, p. 178) Looking at these statistics seems quite high. Thinking that the majority of the high school population uses alcohol is surprising. Advertising alcohol just feeds the fire even more. Alcohol advertising is the major source of information for today's youth concerning alcohol. Estimates indicate that that in any certain year, a typical adolescent may encounter in excess of "two thousand beer, wine, and liquor advertisements from magazines, newspapers, television and billboards.
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U.S. Tobacco Co.A 1996 study of children age's nine to 11 found that children were more familiar with Budweiser's television frogs than Kellogg's Tony the Tiger, the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, or Smokey the Bear." (J. Unger,p.179) In the recent years the internet has become a prime outlet for advertising beer, wine, and liquor. Studies show that the numbers have risen from "forty three web sites that advertise alcohol in 1997 to seventy seven in 1999," (J, Unger,p.179) the stunning thing is that some the websites in which these advertisement are on contain youth material. Websites that contain alcoholic material take very little preventative measure to make sure that youths can't access their material. For example, having visitors to the website with alcoholic content sign in with a date of birth can be very easily manipulated.