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Teenage Drinking Essay

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Teenage Drinking

According to Lang nine out of ten high school seniors have used alcohol, one out of twenty use it daily, and one out of three will get drunk during any given weekend (back cover). Teenage drinking is a very serious problem that is growing by the day in our country. I want to know what kids who drink are getting themselves in to when they decide to start in high school or junior high. What types of health and psychological problems will they be facing? What are the chances that they will become addicted to alcohol, or to some other drug, for life? My father is an alcoholic and has been so for most, if not all, of his life. He began drinking at about the age of twelve, while an altar boy for his church/school …show more content…

Some of them had more information that the others did not; for example, Getting tough on Gateway Drugs centers on alcohol as a first step in the addiction process for most children who become alcoholics (Dupont). They all helped me answer my important questions and agreed on the information they gave. I started out my search at the local library, looked through some books about alcohol, and found several ranging from its uses and abuses to teenage drinking. I did not bother looking in the encyclopedia because I figured that the people who wrote these books had already done it for me. The first book I looked through was by Alan R. Lang (February 29, 2000); I skimmed through the table of contents of the book and saw that it had a section devoted to the short term as well as the long-term effects of alcohol. So, in order to get a better understanding of this issue I turned to the specified page and found that the effect of alcohol is directly related to ones BAC, or blood alcohol concentration (Lang 39). This is what makes different kinds of people engage in a wide array of behaviors, such as when two people drink the same amount of alcohol but the person who has more body mass does not feel the effects of the alcohol. The other person, who has less body mass will get ‘drunk” faster and is said to have less of a “tolerance for alcohol”.
In Volger’s Teenagers and Alcohol, I found an excellent table outlining the

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