MITCHELL — Parents and retailers making alcohol easily available to minors has contributed to what has been deemed a significant problem with alcohol use in Lawrence County.

A call for aggressively tackling alcohol use among underage youth and young adults was the focus of Tuesday’s “rollout luncheon” for presenting the county’s new “Strategic Prevention Framework Epidemiological Report for Lawrence County.”

About 20 community leaders were present for the session at Spring Mill Inn. They were given copies of the new report, which is filled with data collected in Lawrence County and focusing on alcohol use as an activity that often leads to more serious drug abuse.

Parents often are to blame for young people’s access to alcohol. Parents will provide it, thinking it’s safer for their children to do their drinking at home. Katharine Sadler, from the Indiana Prevention Resource Center, told the group, “When you’re giving them the green light to drink at home, you’re giving them the green light to drink at somebody else’s home.”

Sadler talked about retailer compliance checks as one strategy that can help reduce underage drinking. She said the report’s research shows 54 percent of the county’s retailers are selling alcohol to minors.

The Lawrence County coroner’s office reported that, in 2008, 18 deaths in the county were alcohol and drug related and three people were between 18 and 25.

The epidemiological profile, released Tuesday by Hoosier Uplands, was compiled as part of yearlong research grant available through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Bedford’s Juanita Russell, from People Work Associates, told the group of her experiences growing up in the Jay County community of Portland. She said a number of teenagers she knew in the community were killed in traffic accidents after having driven the short distance to Ohio, where alcohol was easily obtained by minors.

“People will say that’s just kids being kids,” Russell told the group. “But I can tell you there were many young people, two or three a year being killed.”

She continued, “Those of us who think that alcohol is a rite of passage and we all did it (have) got faulty thinking. ... We have to change some of our attitudes. Alcohol is not a normal thing for young people to drink.”

The profile is intended to allow the Local Advisory Council of the Lawrence County Strategic Prevention Framework — State Incentive Grant to develop a plan to address the problem of underage drinking and other drug use in Lawrence County.

Although the report will aid in acquiring other grants for the community, Russell stressed, “There are things that we can do educationally and intentionally without dollars. We can just tell the story and we can tell it in every church, every Kiwanis Club meeting, on and on and on in just getting people aware.”

Russell said the new report is useful, but means nothing without the proper mindset. “All of the data in the world will do us absolutely no good, she said. All of the money in the world, coming from the federal government, the state government, will do us absolutely no good until we as a community decide that we are going to take care of our children and we’re going to take care of our children no matter what.”