Underage drinking is rapidly becoming wide spread matter within United States. It considered to be a serious problem not only nationally, but also globally wide. Drinking under the legal age has hiked its way up the ladder to one of the most common forms of substance use.Therefore, what are the health risks, and the preventative actions that need to be taken to help lower the hazards of underage drinking. Every year, thousands of minors die from the use of alcohol. Many young adults abuse the drinking age policy. It is put in effect for substantial reasons, which all contribute in trying to make the safest living environment for all. Drinking underage is not only illegal, but also damages one’s health tremendously.
Thus why, drinking in large amounts is extremely dangerous and can cause detrimental things to occur. There have been countless attempts to create a law to lower the drinking age, but none have gone through.One could argue that if you can serve for our country that you should be able to drink. Others will disagree. On the flipside to what some people might have to say, the drinking age should not be lowered because it would decrease maturity, promote poor behavior, and damage reputations, and also raise the average of teen accidents. In the past, it is known that underage drinking was considered a minor crime, and wasn’t strictly restrained or monitored. As we continued to remain oblivious to countless innocent sips on fathers beer, numbers of adolescent drinkers have gradually increased as they used the tolerant rules. Little does the common citizen realize is that those few innocent sips are linked to multiple health risks. During the early years of childhood and teenage development, the brain is in the critical stage of development. Consumption of alcohol around this stage can stunt memory functions, reactions, and learning abilities. It is known that kids that start to drink by age 13, are known to get worse grades, to skip school, and in the worse case scenario be excluded from school.
While being the most popular legalized dependant drug, there are both short-term and very long-term effects related to the abuse of alcohol. The short-term effects vary on the amount of alcohol consumed by said consumer. In other words the blood alcohol level, mild drinking, for instance, may result in mild effects such as shortened attention span, vomiting, staggering, swaying, blurred vision, and dizziness often associated with nausea. Heavily drinking, on the other hand, may lead to unconsciousness, amnesia, urinary incontinence, decreased heart rate and when it comes down to the very worse,death. Drinking alcohol for over a span of a lifetime may include long-term effects which include increased risk of heart failure, stroke, liver damage as well as multiple liver diseases, anemia and the worse being fetal alcohol syndrome in babies born to women who consumed alcohol during pregnancy. One of the major and most fatal liver diseases includes Cirrhosis. Cirrhosis is caused by severe scarring of the liver, it’s when the liver can no longer heal and return to its normal bodily function and carry out its job. Basically, if you want to help yourself from getting the disease, do not drink underage when your liver is at its peak growth stage. A less commonly known outcome from excessive alcohol consumption is the increased incidence of a variety of cancers (with risk being heightened even more who smoke in conjunction with drinking). Aside from the personal health impact that alcohol abuse has, one must also factor in an increased association with violent crime, and accidents (car or otherwise). All told, the economic costs of alcohol abuse are in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Drinking and driving is another key factor why underage drinking is such a dangerous act. The number one killer for adolescents during this age is already car accidents, either due to lack of experience or opposite party driver error. Although, when you put alcohol and adolescents driving into the picture, the rate of fatal crashes increase more than double the rate of the average 21 and older crash rates. Some ways teens can help be apart of the movement for not drinking and driving is by choosing to never drink and drive, refusing to ride in a car with someone who has been drinking, know the state laws, wear a seatbelt no matter how short of trip. Also, if you see one of your friends trying to leave a get together and you know they have been drinking.
Stop them, do whatever it takes to get the keys out of their hand. At the end of the day you could be saving his/her life, plus other innocent people on the road. Social influences include the likelihood of an individual to engage in underage drinking. Also the status of the individual, low levels of parental guidance and education, family or domestic issues at home, presence of a history of alcoholism in the family, lack of rules on alcohol use in the family setting and peer pressure. These are all indicators of whether an individual will engage in the acts of drinking. The cultural norms in which one has been brought up also play a major role in how someone behaviorally develops and one’s behavior towards alcohol abuse. Being a very big problem to the society, and government at fault, underage drinking may not be totally eradicated but can be reduced to manageable levels if need be. To do this, a collective and strategic approach has to be used in implementing the various recommended prevention measures. The best approach towards reducing adolescent drinking is through numerous strategies which include school-based strategies and classes, family influence, and community as extra curricular activities. Also, to be aware with who your children are hanging around with, to make sure they are a positive influence and will help your child grow positively. The abuse of alcohol has resulted in significant morbidity and mortality among adolescents worldwide.
Many of these youth will lose their lives to alcohol and a significant number are likely to grow up to become alcohol users/ abusers. Although, the substance abuse problem is complex and large in magnitude, there is a substantial amount of evidence-based research available to physicians, community leaders and schools to implement interventions that can decrease adolescent substance abuse rates. Because this issue is not peculiar to any one community or culture, we recognize that individual interventions may not be universally effective. Therefore, we emphasize the strategy of targeting ever changing risk factors and enhancing protective factors through family, school and community prevention programmes, as a generalized baseline for healthcare and community activists to use when trying to protect the youth and create strategies best suited for their own community. Underage drinking will truly never be eradicated, luckily there are multiple things set in action to help minimize casualties and risks. Now it is just time to put all of the knowledge and motions in to action.
