It's graduation time. Prom time. Almost summertime. And so I am inundated by rental tux shops, travel packages to Mexico for the discriminating graduate and, of course, the warnings, threats and shouting about kids drinking.

It'll fuck your life up. This is the warning. This is the message. This is what kids hear all the time. And, of course, they don't care.

Some of them do. Some of them will never drink and drive. Most of them will be just fine if they ignore the warning. Last year in New Mexico 19 teenagers died from drinking and driving accidents. Less than a public school classroom. Almost as many kids in my graduating class flunked their finals and had to go to summer school. That's almost as humiliating as driving into an electrical pole and getting flattened and electrocuted at the same time.

When I went to prom (it was a while ago), they had this prize program. If you signed a form that said you wouldn't drink during prom or graduation, you could win valuable prizes. It was a sham, and I didn't participate even though I didn't drink on prom or on graduation night. I knew it was a sham because one of the guys who one a valuable prize almost fell on his face when he went up to the stage. He was drunk. And he won.

I didn't really start drinking until college, and it wasn't all the time. We couldn't keep alcohol in our dorm rooms because we weren't 21, and it was illegal on campus. So any time we did have it, we had to drink it as fast as we could.

On my 19th birthday, me and a few other friends got a bottle of peppermint schnapps and drank it in about ten minutes. We got instantly drunk. We were loud and almost got in trouble, but we gave the security guys the slip and ended up in my best friend's girlfriend's dorm room (which was also illegal because it was after curfew in an all-female dorm). I ended up in her bed. This would, eventually, end up costing me a few friends and my belief in God. But the fact that I was instant drunk for an hour or so had nothing to do with what happened. It was incidental. It was a regular Friday night. And I thought I was in love.

The problem we have with teenagers drinking is not new. It's always been around and will always be around. Teenagers rebel. They dress how they want. They listen to the music they want. They smoke cigarettes. And they drink because they are just trying to be adults. They want to grow up so quick, the path seems clear: if you drink, you are an adult. We've said it over and over again. You have to be an adult to drink. So if you drink, therefore, you are an adult. The logic isn't hard to understand.

Beer commercials spell this out pretty well. One of the new campaigns is about how much fun it is to dance, flirt, shake your ass and, of course, drink. Kids get the message. And the message is, get a fake ID so you can drink. One of the new girls at work (she's 22) told me that she had three fake IDs. She said that it was really easy to alter the new driver's licenses: just scratch off the numbers and carefully draw in the correct age.

Well, how is it that at age 21, everything is OK? A special magic pass to alcohol, even though, for the most part, no one has told kids how to drink. That the point isn't to drink as much as you can in as short a time as possible. We need to train these kids, just like we train them to drive. And since no public institution would ever fund something like this, parents or older friends must do this.

If you're going to have a few beers, you should eat something at the same time. If you're going to have a few shots with those beers, maybe someone else should drive. A bottle of hard liquor is not something that should be finished in one night, one hour or by one person. These are fast and easy lessons that can be taught in a few weekends.

A few months after my 19th birthday, six of us drove up to the mountains with a big bottle of cheap wine and a 12 pack of Coors Light. It was the best we could do with our twenty bucks. We drank at a place called the rock house, finishing all the beer and half the wine. We almost had to get in a fight to get out of there (a few other guys showed up and were not in the great mood we were in), drove to a Smiths, pissed in the parking lot, drove around to the other side of the mountain, pissed at some camp grounds (about ten feet from people freezing in their tents), drove back down the mountains to the dorms, and, well, we were all OK. Nothing happened. Although the Doors movie soundtrack was burned into our brains since we listened to it all night as we drove around. I don't think that was such a bad thing. I wrote a really bad poem about it later.

So as graduation and prom and the summer make a big swirlie of teenagers' hormones and brains, remember these two things: What it was like when you were a kid. And kids will be kids. The best we can do is give them guidance and hope--threats and warnings and bumper stickers do little more than fuel the fire, because kids have already decided that the people threatening and warning and stickering are full of shit. It's what I thought when I was younger, and I don't think things have changed much.

Matt Worley didn't really learn to like beer until after he turned 21.