The only thing you should be drinking is apple juiceClaire GoldbergStaff WriterMemory loss, car crashes, alcohol poisoning, fines that can amount to thousands of dollars and death. These are all very regular, very real results of drinking. Now does all of this seem worth it for one night of fun?When I was eight, I promised that I would never drink before age 21 and I can now say that I’ve successfully kept that promise. Even though it seemed silly at the time, I now know that it was a good promise to make. I’m not saying that I’m little miss goody-two-shoes, I just know that I don’t have to drink to have fun. The majority of my friends has either tried it or do it regularly, which doesn’t always get my full approval. I always rebut their statements of “You’ve never tried it so how would you know?” and “You can’t say it’s bad until you’ve experienced it” with “It’s illegal, it’s disgusting and I don’t have to try anything to know that it’s bad.”Getting drunk is bad for countless reasons, so let me just name a few: it is, as a matter of fact, illegal; it can be detrimental to your mental and physical health; if you get caught, let’s just say that the consequences are endless and as a person who has experienced drunk people, you act completely idiotic in front of everyone. It changes who you are and even alters what you think you are doing. You, as a high school student, need to focus on getting into college, not killing your brain cells.When I took Drivers Education, one of the lessons was about the cost if you get caught driving drunk. Hopefully you are aware that driving with even 0.01 percent Blood Alcohol Concentration will get you a Driving Under the Influence (DUI) ticket, and it’s not cheap. All together, we learned that the cost was over $10,000. That’s almost as expensive as in-state college tuition. Instead of taking one little sip of alcohol, you could go to college for a year. Not to mention if you get a DUI, it could ruin your chances of even getting into college. Most DUIs are categorized as misdemeanors, however, if the circumstances are more serious a DUI can become a felony which most colleges require you to report.If you do decide to drink, realize that there aren’t just short term effects. You won’t just have a hangover the next day. If you decide to drink, especially if you decide to drink often, you will have to pay for that decision. Not only could you die from getting in a car accident while intoxicated, but if you end up lucky and get home alive, you could end up with some pretty serious symptoms including brain damage, high blood pressure, liver disease and eventually even death. So next time you’re thinking about picking up the bottle, think again.Another big issue with getting drunk is that it is literally and figuratively disgusting. I wish you could see me hit my head against the table as I type, thinking to myself “why are you doing this to yourself?!”Although I’ve never had any of the heavy stuff, the Passover wine was enough for me to know that it’s bitter and gross. From the descriptions my friends have given me, hard liquor can’t taste any better. It’s also unsettling and upsetting to see how people act when they’re drunk: I don’t want to hold anyone’s hair as they throw up.Lastly, you’re a teen. You are on your way to getting a degree, the job of your dreams, the perfect life. You just have to try. I’m not telling you to sit at your desk all day every day slaving away to graduate summa cum laude at Harvard, but I’m saying you need to work. When you get into college and turn 21, you can party all you want. Just make sure your Anthropology paper is done and you have a designated driver. Now is the time to be a kid, have fun and become who you want to be. Trust me, waiting until it’s legal will make it much more fun and, well, legal.So next time you see a bottle of Jack Daniels on the counter at a party, think of the consequences. Getting drunk isn’t the way to get people to like you and definitely isn’t the way to forget your problems. Next time you are tempted to take a sip, play some scrabble, go on a hike, or hell, do your homework instead. But whatever you do, know that in the long run not choosing alcohol is the better option.cgoldberg@thesamohiAlcohol poisoning: The fatal Catch 22
Olivia Legan
NM Editor-in-Chief
A couple avenue blocks from Times Square around 4 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, a barely conscious, sloppily drunk teenage boy isn’t exactly a rarity. Yet, laughing New Yorkers stopped the ebb and flow of foot traffic to take out their phones and snap a picture of my friend’s friend, Josh*, slumped in front of a MidTown high rise. One of his “friends” had even placed an empty bottle in his limp hand and jumped in to pose with him as the flashes went off.I was the only one who was even mildly concerned. Josh, along with a few other of his buddies, had been throwing up down the stairwell of the party at which we had been at after leaving a concert. All the rest that had recovered were pale and sweaty, but standing, walking, functioning — conscious. Josh was not. He could not hold himself up and now was basically unconscious. I couldn’t understand why this was a joke, a spectacle. I pleaded with my friends, who also began to become concerned, to take him to the hospital but they immediately attacked me when I suggested this.“They’ll call his parents! We’ll all get in trouble!”“We’re underage! We’ll get arrested!”The aggressive, absolute and resounding NO I received puzzled me. Obviously Josh needed help. There was a hospital a few blocks away that could provide that help. However, in the moment, I could understand the fear that was holding Josh’s safety hostage. It was true — they were underage and they had been drinking that night. Josh was clearly wasted. But Josh’s life was obviously in danger and I had read many, many headlines declaring the deaths of a fourteen, sixteen or nineteen year old from alcohol poisoning. I spent about an hour arguing with my friends to take him to the hospital. Yet, it was eight to one and I was eventually convinced to let them take Josh back home upstate. Josh ended up being fine, but I felt horribly guilty for the first month of the new year. What if he hadn’t been okay? What if he had choked on his own vomit or his heart had stopped beating?Many other teenagers are faced with this Catch 22 when a friend gets alcohol poisoning. According to Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, 79,000 Americans die every year from excessive alcohol use. However, there is very little information about how many underage drinkers die from alcohol poisoning. There is even less information about specific laws concerning a hospital’s role in notifying parents and/or calling the police if a drunk teen stumbles into its emergency room.Fear of being grounded or arrested should not come before fear of bodily injury. Teaching kids not to drink is important, but it’s unrealistic to assume that all youth will always abstain from alcohol. Education on the dangers of drinking should come with information on how to stay safe while under the influence.Only once accessible information is presented to youth about how to safely drink and an open dialogue is made between adults and youth concerning the legal implications of alcohol poisoning will young lives be saved.*Name changed to respect privacy.Even if your future college or university does not require you to complete this alcohol education requirement, http://www.alcohol101plus.org/home.html is an interactive website filled with corny ’80s videos about college drinking, alcohol poisoing and sexual abuse. Despite the cheesy interface, the tips it gives are vital to staying safe in college. They range from how to know if a friend has alcohol poisoning to how to casually turn down a drink. College is a socially exciting time, but it is also a stressful time. The combination of these two sets undergraduates up to abuse alcohol or binge drink. College has the potential to be the best, most educational experience of your life before you’re launched into a world of responsibility. Don’t let alcohol ruin it. If you’re going to drink, be smart about it and watch out for your friends.
olegan@thesamohi
No problem — if you’re responsibleMax Gumbel
News Editor
My parents offer me alcohol fairly frequently. They don’t go buying me handles of vodka, they just let me have a glass of wine every once in a while. My dad is European, and this is how I’ve always explained his less severe attitude towards drinking.And while American parents may not always be that strict either, there is an extreme stigma surrounding alcohol in this country — for example, if I took even a sip of wine in a public restaurant and somebody saw, odds have it that he or she would freak out. If that person operated the restaurant I was in, I would probably get kicked out altogether. Parents can receive severe legal punishments for letting minors drink in their houses. And, considering that those who feel the desire to drink alcohol often start doing so in their early teenage years, this 21-plus restriction creates a lot of problems.But let me go off on a tangent for a second and talk about my personal, changing relationship with alcohol. When I was in the second grade, two presenters came into my classroom to tell us about alcohol and drugs. They had us make posters describing the negative effects of each, and then had us promise to keep the posters in our rooms and promise not to drink illegally.I took this promise very seriously -— when I took my first sip of alcohol without the permission and supervision of my parents I cried the whole night after. I was afraid that my drinking alcohol was making me into a bad person, someone who would be all the bad things those presenters in the second grade described.Though I eventually figured myself out, my fear of alcohol caused in me deep emotional toil, something ridiculous for anybody to go through in the context of something like alcohol.The best solution, although open-ended, is for people to just stop treating alcohol like it’s that big a deal, because it doesn’t have to be. At age 16, a glass of red wine or even a shot of vodka won’t cause brain damage or make you vomit all over yourself. From what I can tell, making alcohol mysterious and forbidden makes it proportionately more appealing and therefore more likely to cause harm. If we could just openly take alcohol as it is, we wouldn’t hear so many stories of trips to the hospital or DUIs.Having sex before the age of 18, after all, is illegal and has the potential to be dangerous. We are, however, educated about sex and acknowledge the fact that it happens. For the most part, we are still struggling to reach that same level of acceptance of teenage alcohol consumption. How do we know our limits? Is it safe to mix alcohol? As the school system would have it, I wouldn’t know because all I’ve ever been told is not to drink at all.Let’s be real now, teenagers are going to drink, and there is no viable way to stop that. We can only make sure that we do so responsibly.All of this to say to teenagers: “drink responsibly.” We may never be told exactly what that means in our Freshman Seminar classes, but a fear of alcohol is less safe either way. If you want to drink, drink, if you don’t want to, don’t, and be safe in either situation. I don’t think it should be that complicated or scary either way.mgumbel@thesamohi.com
