Under Age Drinking : The Problems It Creates Essay, Research Paper

Under Age Drinking : The Problems It Creates

It’s a Saturday night, and the bars are packed. People are inside

having a few, or more than a few, drinks. A select few are really drunk or

passed out. Now lets step outside and take a look at a different type of

drinking, drinking at an early age. High school and junior high kids are at a

party drinking. Like the adults, some are just having a few, but quite a few

are having more than that and are stumbling around.

These kids have been given the idea that drinking is something that

adults do, and we all know that kids can’t wait to be grown up. Thus, they

drink, figuring that if they can at least do what adults do then they will be

grown up, in a way. This is how our society works.

Enough with the philosophy of it. Now I would like to talk about the

effects that early age drinking can have on a person. I grew up in a town that

has the most bars per capata in the state of Montana and is in the top ten in

the United States. This has a huge effect on under age drinkers. The bars card

at the door and as long as your 18 your in. And since the bouncers will stamp

nearly anyone they know or like the number of kids is always high. It dosn’t

help that Dillon is a college town and ther are many under age college kids

there. Now lets imagine another party where kids are drinking.

The bonfire is roaring, Bubba just decided that singeing everyone’s

eyebrows off by throwing some gasoline on the fire would be fun. Of course

nobody thought that this was very funny except for Bubba. Bubba is not the only

teenage person at this party who has had a few to many. There are a lot of

under age kids who are just plain drunk. This is a regular kind of party in my

hometown, everyone goes out and drinks to get drunk. The sad thing is, that

these kind of parties happen a lot of time twice a week expecially during the

spring. All this partying catches up with these young peolpe. They don’t get

jobs because they are too tired from partying all night or all weekend long.

Thier grades start slipping. The worst effect, however has to be the addiction

to alcohol. I’ve seen freshman who drink all the time because they feel they

can’t live without their alcohol. Of course you have to realize that this is a

worst case scenario. I also know kids who drink just a little, they know their

limits, and don’t try to break them.

Now here’s another worst case scenario. A college kid has been studying

for a few hours, you can feel the boredom in the room. He decides to take a few

minutes off and cracks open a beer to relieve the tension. The only problem is

that he doesn’t stop there. He decides to have a few more, then after finishing

a couple more he calls up his buddies and the go out and drink some more. He

wakes up in his room on his floor or in someone else’s room, thinking he must

have passed out. He has a really bad hangover and decides to sleep it off. He

wakes up quite a bit later, and in the room next to him you can here his long

string of profanities. I guess he remembered the big test he is suppose to take.

He crams in what material he can in what little time he has, knowing he won’t

be able to learn it all. He takes the test and knows he failed, this the fifth

test he has failed so far and his GPA is way below par. Two days later he gets

a letter saying that he is out of school for breaking academic probation, again

this is a worst case scenario.

My last scenario is a person at around thirty or forty. You can see an

old beat-up pickup drive in and park in front of one of the bars. He walks into

the bar, a half-an-hour later he stumbles out and heads to another bar. Two

hours later, and a twelve pack more, he stumbles his way out of the second bar.

He walks to his pickup opens the door and tries to climb in but is to drunk. He

finally gets in and passes out in his pickup. He wakes up the next morning hung

over, just like the last three mornings. Except today is different, today he

feels a pain in his stomach, not to harsh but it can be felt. He continues to

drink and the pain just seems to get worse. After a while the pain has become

so intense he has to go see a doctor. He comes out with some bad news finding

out that he has Pancreatitis. Pancreatitis is a type of alcoholic poisoning,

and as he has found out one cannot drink any more alcohol with this disease.

This is one of the harshest diseases that goes along with the consumption of

alcohol. In my hometown there are at least five or six examples of this, one

the English teacher I had just last year. He was forced to retire before this

year. Another man who has recently acquired it didn’t amount to anything before

he got it. He couldn’t keep a job for more than a couple of weeks and the money

he did earn didn’t go to anything besides more alcohol, spending nearly every

night at the bars.

No one means to end up being addicted to alcohol but for many different

reasons people find more and more excuses to drink and finally become addicted.

Alcohol has become a major problem in our society whether it be teenagers or

even adults. Alcohol laws and alcohol awareness programs can only go so far I

feel it is the responsibility of each and every one of us to take the matter

into our own hands and make the right choices.