More Teens Are Binge Drinking

She looked too young. But at 14, Koren Zailckas took her first sip of Southern Comfort. Soon the sips turned to shots.

Was she drinking to get drunk?

"Absolutely," Zailckas told CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. "The goal was always to get drunk, to that point of 'past gone.'"

One night she was so "gone," she had to have her stomach pumped. She was 16.

"I was 16, and I woke up the next morning in my parents' house wearing a hospital gown and the ID bracelet from the hospital, with no recollection of what happened," Zailckas said.

Today, her recollections are laid out in her best-selling memoir, "Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood."

Zailckas' book is dramatic, but her stories of binge drinking and blackouts are not unique.

According to a CDC study released today, nearly half of all high school students admit to drinking, and most of them to binge drinkers.

"The real problem with binge drinking is that these kids are likeliest to become alcoholics and abusers," said Joseph Califano, chairman of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

Zailckas said she never thought of alcohol as a drug, but found out it was just as dangerous.

"I woke up from one blackout when I was 19 years old with some boy, and had no idea what happened the night before, and didn't really know what had happened, and didn't want to know at that point," she said.

She later learned she had lost her virginity.

Did she keep drinking after that?

"I did, yeah," she said.

Studies show 13,000 kids will take their first drink today. For a lot of them, it's just the first round.