Alcohol and Our Teens
As teenagers struggle to assert their independence and establish their adulthood, many are tempted by peer pressure, movies and advertising to experiment with alcohol. Alcohol may provide a means of identifying with the adult world, but it soon becomes a facilitater of behaviour, often antisocial, that also earns acceptance with peers.
Alcohol has a strong association with activities glorified by a proportion of teenagers, including wild parties, reckless driving, show-off-type behaviour and fighting. Such activities, often carried out on weekends, are the subjects of conversation the following week, subtly reinforcing and glorifying the antisocial behaviour, which is then anticipated with relish.
On weekends some nightspots are packed with teenagers out of control on alcohol and drugs. Vandalism, such as broken shop windows, car aerials and letterboxes and property damaged by gangs of marauding drunken youths, regularly occurs on Friday and Saturday nights. Random bashings are also common. End-of-school parties are a time when many teenagers glorify in getting drunk.
In Australia, Queensland’s Gold Coast has become a focal point for drunken parties to celebrate the completion of school. Students travel interstate to take part in what has become known as Schoolies Week on the Gold Coast, and is widely reported and even glorified in the media.
Having sex, taking drugs and throwing things off balconies are high on many schoolies’ agenda. But the main objective is to get drunk. An estimated 20,000 of the 60,000 Gold Coast schoolies binge drink, participate in pub crawls, and engage in gross activities such as vomit competitions, and drinking beer from shoes. Many participants are barely 18.
Journalist Emma Tom, in a feature on Schoolies Week, said that when she asked the teenagers why they’d come, they often chorused “To get drunk,” “To let loose” or “To drink till we spew.”
But while drunken parties can produce degrading behaviour, not everyone chooses to participate in these activities. For example, one year, while tens of thousands of teenagers around Australia were drinking themselves stupid at parties, Elizabeth Hammond of Sydney, on completing her school exams, caught a plane not to Schoolies Week celebrations in Surfers, but to Thailand.
There she travelled to a remote village to care for and teach the children of refugees who had fled from a civil war in a neighbouring country. It was some weeks after the school results were announced in January, and while living on a meagre diet of rice and vegetables that Elizabeth learned she’d achieved academic distinction as the top female student in New South Wales for her year. She later returned to Australia to be presented with the Premier’s Medal and other awards.
She’s a nondrinker and said all of the other young volunteers she’d met while helping were likewise nondrinkers. Some had also been outstanding academic achievers and had taken a break from their studies to care for and teach underprivileged children.
As a community, we recognise academic achievements, but far less public recognition and reward is given for the caring work done by young people. Yet we often indirectly sponsor the anti-caring activities of drunken youths. For example, the cost of cleaning up broken glass, rubbish and vomit, and repairing the damaged property after the Gold Coast Schoolies Week is borne by local rate- and taxpayers.
Similarly when 4000 students from the University of Newcastle went on a night-long pub crawl a few years ago, the cost of cleaning up smashed glass and rubbish along the Newcastle foreshore and replanting trees was paid by ratepayers. On the other hand the major hotels and clubs involved in the evening revealed that their takings were in the order of $6000-$8000 at each venue.
But let’s consider another view of the world. One of the refugee teenage girls Elizabeth Hammond helped penned these words:
“I hate to think about war and hatred. We want only peace. Because of this war, we have to stay in other people country and far way from our relatives. Sometime because of this war, many of people have to suffer disease, loneliness, sadness and we don’t have enough food. We have no place, no right to work in our own field and stand by our selves so other people have to help us and feed us.
“When we think about this war it makes us worrying a lot and affect many things in our life. Some time we have to worry about our families relatives and think about what will happen to us tomorrow or even today. We don’t know what will happen to our future because of this war.
“Many people who we loved, already give their soul and body for us and I’m sure will still going on now and so on. War bring only trouble and sadness so I don’t feel like writing this much. We want our own freedom and liberty. Peace, peace, peace not war, please.”
As these refugee teenagers worry about their future, many Western teenagers seek to obliterate any thought of their own with alcohol.
When we look seriously at the teenage drinking problem, it’s not surprising that an Australian survey commissioned by Family Circle magazine discovered that 90 per cent of parents consider alcohol a major problem among teenagers. And their opinion isn’t without foundation. A survey of 500 Australian high schools found that 85 per cent of under-14 secondary students had taken alcohol at some time. This figure rose to 92 per cent for 16-19-year-olds.
Follow-up studies revealed that by age 16, about 50 per cent of students drink regularly. A subsequent study by Sydney University’s Department of Public Health of almost 4000 16-year-olds found that 40 per cent drink just to get drunk. Some 20 per cent of the students studied said that they’d passed out under the influence of alcohol at least once.
Such behaviour has serious implications for the sexual integrity of females, who may be taken advantage of and sexually assaulted while unconscious or in a state of high intoxication. And teenage drinkers are more likely to engage in early and unprotected sexual intercourse as well.
The New Zealand Family Planning Association has expressed its concern about the links between alcohol consumption and “unsafe” or unintended sex leading to unplanned pregnancies and the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases.
Their surveys reveal that many teenagers participate in “unsafe” sex after too much alcohol. Some, who usually practise safe sex, do not do so if they have consumed too much alcohol, while others, who have no intention of having sexual intercourse, do so when they’re drunk. Casual sex becomes common under the influence of alcohol.
Family-planning clinics, taking the histories of young women asking for the “morning-after pill,” find it isn’t unusual for clients to tell of going to a party, getting drunk, having sexual intercourse and not using contraception. Sometimes their clients were so drunk, they admit they didn’t know if they’d had intercourse or not!
Staff reported that some women were still so hung-over and nauseated that having them take the pill without vomiting was extremely difficult. For these young women, the liquor advertisements promises of fun in the hotel proved, in reality, to be a nauseating nightmare.
In fact, alcohol may be a major factor as to why family-planning sex-education programs have failed to stem the steady increase in teenage pregnancies of the past two decades. Unwed pregnancies among 18- and 19-year-olds increased 87 per cent over the period. No doubt much of this was due to alcohol, which renders reason and caution void.
Many underage teenagers have adults buy alcohol for them. Whether or not this constitutes child abuse is a moot point. However, in many instances it betrays the duty of care toward children by adults and some ruthless adults exploit the drinking habits of children.
An early introduction to alcohol can have devastating effects on children, some of which results in their lives being forever changed for the worse. As many as three-quarters of juvenile criminal offenders are problem drinkers, and around half are drunk when they committed the crime.
The drinking habits of offenders are also revealing. A survey of 197 offenders, with an average age of 16 years, showed that 64 per cent drank alcohol every weekend and 45 per cent would drink until they passed out or were drinking so heavily that the next day they couldn’t remember what had happened. Almost a quarter had alcoholic-like drinking patterns.
With the legalisation of drinking for 18- and 19-year-old teenagers, more lives were affected by alcohol at an earlier age. At the 35th International Congress on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, held at Oslo, in 1988, Dr D I Smith reported that the lowering of the legal minimum drinking age to 18 years in four Australian states, corresponded to a 20 to 30 per cent jump in male juvenile crime. Street crimes, such as property damage and offensive behaviour, became more common, with the main offenders being young men under the influence of alcohol.
Traffic safety was also adversely affected. For example, in Western Australia there was a 20 per cent increase in public hospital admissions for male road accident casualties aged 18-20 years.
Using 1998-99 statistics, the report Counting the Cost prepared for the Federal Government’s National Drug Strategy—released in January 2003—estimates that alcohol-related crime now costs the Australian taxpayer $A1.7 billion each year.
The report also estimates that in 1998-99, alcohol caused 4286 deaths. When alcohol-related health care and road accident costs are included, the cost of alcohol’s destructive effect on the Australian community in monetary terms alone blows out to a whopping $A7.5 billion per year.
Of course, teenage drinkers are not the only ones responsible for this enormous cost to the community—older drinkers contribute the larger share. However, a point not to be missed is that the majority of these older drinkers learned to drink as teenagers. While some teenagers can and do control their drinking, the evidence suggests that the majority don’t and are vulnerable to alcohol abuse.
As emerging adults, they have a need to establish not only their identity and values, but also their self-worth in the eyes of society which, in Western cultures, is becoming increasingly based on performance in sport, academics or employment.
A simple alternative to achievement is a drug that makes you feel good about yourself. Most commonly the drug of choice is alcohol. Given that it is closely linked to many self-destructive outcomes—illness, crime, venereal disease, unwanted pregnancy, poor school and university grades, poor work and business performance, road casualties, accidents and mental retardation in offspring—alcohol use by young adults prematurely predisposes them to hardship and disadvantage for the rest of their lives.
Drinking alcohol is potentially more dangerous than driving a car or owning a gun. But there are several things that could be done if our societies were to become serious about tackling the problem. For instance, the availability of alcohol could be limited in the community by banning its sale at venues that attract young people, such as sports events and rock concerts.
Young teenagers could be better educated in the hazards of drinking. The legal drinking age could be raised. And the advertisement of alcohol products on television could be banned (with the ban on cigarette advertising providing the model).
These are realistic and practical possibilities for limiting the destruction and social and health costs of alcohol without limiting the freedom of responsible adults to choose to drink or not.
More information is available from the Australian Drug and Alcohol Foundation, www.adf.org.au
Alcohol use
Alcohol is the most widely used mood-changing, recreational drug in Australia. Because it is so widely used and socially acceptable, it is often not considered a drug, nor is it considered to be particularly harmful.
- It is not an offence for a young person to receive, possess or consume alcohol in a private residence.
- Almost 13 million Australians aged 14 years and over consumed alcohol in the past 12 months.
- Almost 10 per cent consumed alcohol on a daily basis. Fewer than one in 100 teenagers drink alcohol daily.
- Almost 10 per cent have never consumed a full glass of alcohol.
- Males (46 per cent) are more likely than females (33) to drink weekly.
- Nearly one in three teenagers were weekly drinkers, and almost half consumed alcohol less than weekly.
Source: Drug info clearinghouse, Australian Drug Foundation
Immediate effects
After a few drinks . . .
Feel more relaxed, reduced concentration and slower reflexes
A few more drinks . . .
Fewer inhibitions, overconfidence, reduced coordination, slurred speech, intense moods—eg sad, happy, angry
Still more drinks . . .
Confusion, blurred vision, poor muscle control
And more . . .
Nausea, vomiting, sleep
Even more . . .
Possible coma or death
Source: Drug info clearinghouse, Australian Drug Foundation
| This is an extract from April 2003
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