Tax data reveal that the decline in total alcohol consumption per capita has averaged about 1 percent per year. Nearly all of this decrease has resulted from a decline in the use of distilled spirits. The Monitoring the Future survey and the National Household Survey of Drug Abuse both suggest that youthful drinking has declined substantially between 1979 and 1992. However, the growing negative sentiment about alcohol may have caused self-reports of drinking to decline more sharply than drinking behavior itself. Student reports of friends' drinking indicate either no change or a modest decline; neither suggests the rate of decline produced by the self-report studies. The indirect indicator of alcohol-related mortality indicates a considerable decline between 1979 and 1988. However, the overall trend is unclear, because youthful mortality from traffic accidents and other accidents declined, while suicide and homicide increased. Thus, both the surveys and the data on indirect indicators have methodological problems, and it is surprising that the data are unclear regarding national trends in youth's consumption of the most commonly used psychoactive substance. Figures, tables, notes, and 19 references