Today’s seniors rarely consume three or more drinks at one sitting, and few have ever used an illegal drug or taken a drug without a doctor’s prescription or at a higher dose than directed, says a recent survey released last Tuesday. Those results might be low, as it is difficult to get people to admit to such behaviors in a telephone interview, noted Tim Vercellotti, assistant director of Rutgers University’s Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, which did the survey. But there were some surprises: Married, well-educated and higher income elderly people were most likely to drink alcohol, compared with single and widowed people and with those with less education and money. White people over age 65 also were more likely to drink alcohol than those of other races. Vercellotti said researchers, who questioned 500 New Jersey residents age 65 and over, thought they would find that drinking alcohol would be more common among New Jersey seniors who live alone. “What we found was just the opposite,” he said. “As your social network was more active and more vibrant, perhaps you had more opportunity (to drink alcohol).” The survey found half the elderly respondents had their first alcoholic drink after turning 18 then the legal drinking age and 22 percent said they had never had an alcoholic drink. Another 20 percent acknowledged drinking alcohol while underage, including 6 percent who began drinking at 14 or younger. Another 8 percent didn’t answer. The contrast with recent research on American high school and college students was startling. Their answers from surveys done by the University of Michigan’s ongoing study of youth behavior and attitudes, “Monitoring the Future” show 43 percent of 13- and 14-year-olds and 60 percent of 17-year-olds in 2004 said they had consumed at least one alcoholic drink. Likewise, only 6 percent of the senior citizens in the new study acknowledged ever using any type of illegal drug, compared with 61 percent of 19- through 28-year-olds surveyed for the Monitoring the Future study between 1975 and 2004. The Eagleton survey highlights the need for more efforts to keep youth from abusing alcohol and other drugs, experts said. It also sets a benchmark to measure substance abuse problems among future senior citizens. “We have to try harder in the future” to prevent abuse, said Joseph “J.P.” Miele, founder and chairman of the partnership, terming the results “a call to arms.” “Drugs were not as available in the 50s, in the 40s, as they are today,” Miele added. He said research shows that while young people experiment with drugs more than their elders did, prevention efforts do limit ongoing abuse. The survey, commissioned by the anti-drug alliance Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey, was done last October and November. It has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points. Prevention is more cost-effective than treatment, especially for young people, and is better than the old approach of firing workers with drug problems, said former Gov. James J. Florio.