Alcohol misuse presents a major risk for health and well-being throughout the life-span, but youth have a special vulnerability. Alcohol is the most widely used drug by adolescents. For some, this may be one or two isolated occasions of youthful experimentation; for others, the use becomes excessive, placing them in danger of immediate adverse consequences such as accidental injury and alcohol poisoning, or encouraging other high-risk behavior patterns including unprotected sex. Moreover, a pattern of heavy drinking established in adolescence and young adulthood may continue into an adult pattern of alcohol abuse.
Concerned communities and institutions across the nation are tackling the problem of alcohol use and abuse by young people. Research-based knowledge is urgently needed to inform these efforts and to ensure that limited prevention resources are used as effectively as possible. The origins of youthful alcohol use and abuse are found within the complex interplay of individual characteristics, family and peer influences, the larger societal context for alcohol use, environmental conditions, and maturational processes that accompany adolescence.
This volume, which began as a special issue of the "Journal of Research on Adolescence," contains all of the material from the journal issue plus additional chapters. It helps researchers to meet the tremendous challenge of disentangling the key determinants of risk, and developing effective interventions. Primary sources of influence on youthful alcohol use are described, ranging from individual expectancies about alcohol effects and cognitive decision processes to parenting practices, peer influences, social environments, and economic factors; and a corresponding range of prevention interventions is discussed. This book will serve as a primer to those with an interest in developing and improving effective programs and activities to reduce alcohol-related problems among young people. For those engaged in prevention research, the text will provide useful reviews and current findings that should aid in directing future research activities.

Adolescence is a developmental period marked by dramatic and rapid biological and social transformation; it is also a time of increasing rates of experimentation with substance use. This period and the risk behaviors that often accompany it cannot be fully understood from the vantage point of any single discipline, nor can they be described by focusing on only the behavioral and social problems of the period, the characteristics of normal development, or the pharmacology and addictive potential of specific drugs. Instead, a comprehensive approach requires knowledge of the brain's systems of reward and control, genetics, psychopharmacology, personality, child development, psychopathology, family dynamics, peer group relationships, culture, social policy, and more. Drawing on the expertise of leading researchers from multiple fields, The Oxford Handbook of Adolescent Substance Abuse provides the most comprehensive summarization to date of current knowledge about substance abuse during life's most tumultuous developmental stage. The Handbook is organized into eight sections covering the literature on the developmental context of this life period, the epidemiology of adolescent use and abuse, similarities and differences in use, addictive potential, and consequences of use for different drugs; etiology and course as characterized at different levels of mechanistic analysis ranging from the genetic and neural to the behavioral and social. Two sections cover the clinical ramifications of abuse, and prevention and intervention strategies to most effectively deal with these problems. The last section addresses the role of social policy in framing the problem and in addressing it, and explores its potential role in alleviating it. This volume's authoritative treatment of these issues and the breadth of its coverage make it suitable as a compendium of what is currently known; at the same time, its level of detail provides a reference text and a jumping off place for researchers already at work in the field.