Alcohol has a very dangerous effect on our brain. Anytime that someone drinks they affects the different layers to our brain the more that we drink. If a person continues to affect the inner layers of the brain by getting blackout drunk on a regular basis, they can cause permanent damage to the brain. Though this may seem as if it is only a problem in the moment, this can have severe, lifelong consequences to our underdeveloped brain. Underage drinking has a negative effect on the brain and behavioral patterns.

The pregame starts in Jared’s room on floor fifteen at nine o’clock sharp, so tell everyone to come. All thirteen kids are crammed into one room, playing beer pong, going shot for shot with each other and playing loud music in a residence hall on campus at the University of South Carolina. By ten-thirty everyone in the room is drunk. After about midnight all the underage teenagers decide to go to Five Points and begin their night at one of the bars. They all get into The Horseshoe with their fake identification, which they use as they hop bars all night long and begin to approach blackout drunk. By the end of the night, which is about two o’clock in the morning, only half of the group is still together at their usual ending spot, Cotton Gin. Some are at other bars, some are on their way back to the Residence Hall, and some have gone home with other people that they met in one of the bars earlier that night.

There are so many issues presented in the scenario described above and all of them can be related back to the alcohol that was consumed by each of these underage students in this short period of time. If the factor of underage drinking was not involved in the scenario, then the story would have played out much differently. The fact of the matter is that underage drinking can cause several issues including alcohol dependency, brain developmental issues both now and later in life, and behavioral issues such as car accidents, injuries, and sexual assaults. This should not be the case.

As a group teenagers, especially college students are under a lot of pressure from many different people. Pressure to be make good test grades, to maintain a healthy social life, to get all of their assignments done on time and done well, and some are even faced with the pressure of playing a sport. Some teenagers also have to deal with the pressures of getting a job so that they can pay for themselves to go through school, among other activities that they have to pay for. With all of this going on, it is not hard to see why these students can become overwhelmed from day to day, especially around exam time when the pressure is extremely hard to do well in every single class that we are taking for that semester. 

Facing these pressures leads many teenagers to substance abuse. This becomes the students’ outlet or way of escape from all of the pressures of their lives and since almost everyone around them is going through the same thing to a certain degree, they tend to form habits together. One way to forget all of your problems and responsibilities is to get blackout drunk. Getting to the point that you will not remember what is happening around you or the walk home is the “perfect” way to forget the stress of the Spanish assignment that you have due on Sunday that you haven’t started or even done the reading for that will take you at least six hours to read. Known for the inability to make smart decisions—which is why we must have parents—it is not surprising that most teenagers do not take the time out to think about the logical way to handle this situation. 

I am sure that if any of us called our parents with this dilemma, they would tell us to stay in for the night and finish our homework because there will always be more times to go out but not another time to make up the assignment, which is why we do not call our parents. Instead we just decide to go out with our friends and avoid our responsibilities with the rest of our peers. This also causes us to have issues in several other areas of our life because of the developed habit (Wechsler 71).

Alcohol should not be an outlet for the stress that college students endure, that makes way to substance abuse of alcohol. Students then think that they can go out and have fun and also get their work done because the first three or four times they did it they were able to finish everything just in the nick of time. They also feel as if they can handle all of their responsibilities better if they can get relief for just a few hours two or three nights a week (McClellan 810). All of a sudden, these students are out getting blackout drunk multiple nights a week which leads to so many other issues (Silveri 190).

Dependency on something is when the body is so used to having something, that it will go into withdrawals if it does not have what it has become dependent on to focus. For instance, I drank Coke-o-Cola twice a day almost every day and one day I just decided I was going to stop drinking the soda so much. Without noticing it, I had stopped drinking them all together. Because my body was so used to me drinking Coke every day, it began to have withdrawals. I began to have headaches and I was also unable to sleep at night because I needed my “fix” of Coke. 

Dependency is easy depending on the intensity of the substance. It is also different from addiction which is not being able to function without the substance. It is often discussed when referring to drugs, but it is also an issue in regards to alcohol. Once a person is used to drinking on a regular basis such as, three to five times a week, every week for a whole semester, their body is used to having alcohol in its system. If you take the alcohol out of the body system, the body starts to crave the substance. This makes it more difficult for someone who drinks regularly to stop. They do not like the way that their body feels without the alcohol, so they feed it. Upon continuing this cycle though, unfortunately, dependence on alcohol will eventually lead to addiction.

The consumption of alcohol directly affects the brain. There are several “layers” to the brain and when alcohol is consumed it affects the different layers one by one (TurningPointTraining). The more alcohol that a person consumes, the more layers of the brain are effected and the deeper the issues from drinking will go. The most important parts of the brain are in the inner layers. They are protected by other layers so that they are the last to get hurt if anything is to happen. The layers control different emotions.

Drinking will first affect your social skills, which is why people become more social when they have consumed alcohol. The next layer that is effected deals with coordination. This causes people to stumble when they have been drinking. The final and most important layer that is affected by alcohol consumption deals with consciousness. This is what causes people to become blackout and this is also the reason that many people forget things that happen during the night.

Blanks in memory are more common with teenagers and because they remember the night for the most part they think they “aren’t that drunk.” The truth is that each time they get to this point they are effecting the inner layer of their brain. Because our brains are still developing at a young age, when we negatively affect our brain in any way we are causing developmental issues.

Many people will argue that teenagers consuming alcohol has no different of an effect than adults consuming alcohol (Morean 184). They believe that it is dangerous for the brain and causes people to behave differently all across the age groups, so why just focus on preventing teens from drinking when you should focus on everyone? While that is true to a certain extent because alcohol consumption in excess does affect all age groups, it is more dangerous for the youth to consume alcohol because of the fact that our brains are not fully developed until we reach about twenty-four years of age. 

One effect of taking steroids is that it stunts your growth which is why people wait until their bodies are done growing before they begin to use steroids to supplement their bodies. Can you imagine giving steroids to children, who still have so much growing left to do, before their bodies are ready for such a strong substance like that? That is the same thing that alcohol does to teenagers, just on the brain instead of the body. Isn’t stunting the growth of your brain much worse than being short? Especially if we look at the long-term effects on our bodies and brains. Being short when you are sixty-four is not nearly as big of a deal as having Alzheimer’s at the age of sixty-four. But when you are a teen in college, fresh into the world of freedom where you no longer have to report to your parents about what you do, or at least not everything and it is much easier to hide things from them in a different city, why would you think of the long-term effects of the decisions that you make. We just think that when our parents tell us that the decisions we make now can shape our future in a positive or negative way, that they are just trying to scare us into doing the right thing so that they have peace of mind and can sleep at night. But maybe, just maybe, for once, about one thing, our parents are right. They might be on to something that the decision we make to become blackout three nights a week can cause us to look at our children one day and not have any idea as to who they are. Crazy, right? 

The consumption of alcohol also causes people to behave differently. Because the judgement part of the brain is affected when alcohol is consumed, it often causes people to make poor choices. Many people make the decision to drive cars under the influence. This causes so many accidents that kill and injure thousands of people each year (Hingson 14). It is hard for most people to understand what makes people under the influence decide to make poor decisions like this. It seems as if no one would ever make such a deadly decision. But because the people who consume alcohol are not in the right frame of mind—they are influenced—they do not think about their actions or the consequences to their actions. The only thing that they are thinking in that moment is how they are going to get from point A to point B. The possibly fatal decision to get behind the wheel of a car even if you are just “buzzed” can have major consequences, if you live to have to deal with them. Failure to be able to make a sound decision is the effect of alcohol on our brain and yet, some choose to be in this state multiple times a week. 

Sexual assault is a major issue on college campuses. The amount of reported cases of sexual assault on the campus of universities is already astonishing, not to mention the amount of cases that are not reported. Most of these incidents happen when college teenagers are intoxicated. Though this may seem coincidental because if the facts about how often these students consume alcohol are true, then they must be going through life drunk, it’s no wonder that they are having sex while they are drunk. But for one, they are just having sex, they are being assaulted, they are getting or giving consent and that is a major issue. Even if the fact that college students consume so much alcohol that they do everything drunk, then again, we see the problem. College students should not be consuming alcohol underage. 

Earlier I discussed how the different layers of the brain are effected as people consume alcohol. Balance and coordination is about the second layer of our brains to be affected by alcohol consumption. This causes us to lose balance and stumble over if a certain amount of alcohol is consumed. If someone gets to this point, they can cause injury to themselves or others around them by falling over or on another person. Sure this doesn’t seem like a big deal, just a scraped up knee or some minor bruises and scrapes. However, if someone were walking across the train tracks in Five Points in Columbia and attempts to run across the train tracks quickly before the train comes and they trip and fall on the tracks, then that could be catastrophic. Of course, this could be a potential danger with anyone who is drinking, even if they are of legal age. Teenagers are more susceptible to self-harm than any other age group though, and part of it is due to the fact that we do not know ourselves and our bodies yet. We are still learning who we are and how much we can handle. We need to figure that out before we attempt to experiment with alcohol or any other substance for that matter.

For many, if not all teenagers it may seem as if there are not many ways to cope with everything that they are going through, but they should understand that alcohol is not one of those ways. There are several different ways that teenagers can find to help them cope with the pressures that they are feeling. Society as a whole should focus more on helping teenagers find an outlet to their problems and situations that will not cause harm to them in the future. Underage alcohol consumption has a negative effect on the brain as well as on behavioral effects. But it is not worth the temporary thrill that comes from it.
