Alcohol has a very dangerous effect on our brain. Anytime that someone consumes alcohol, they affect the different layers of the brain with each drink they consume. If a person continues to affect the inner layers of the brain, 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. Since our brains are not fully developed until we are twenty-five, altering our brain functions before it is fully developed can cause not only temporary damage but permanent damage as well (Lubman). Underage drinking causes life-long effects on the brain, dependency on substances along with substance abuse, as well as negatively effecting decision making.

The pregame starts in Jared’s room on floor fifteen at ten 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 eleven-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 is that underage drinking can cause several issues such as alcohol dependency, brain developmental issues both now and later in life, and behavioral issues such as car accidents, injuries, and sexual assaults.

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 each of their assignments done on time and done well, and some are even faced with the pressure of playing a sport. Some teenagers also deal with the pressures of getting a job so that they can pay for themselves to go through school, among other activities that they 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 they are taking for that semester. 

Drinking in excess then becomes the students’ outlet or way of escape from all 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 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 poor decision making also causes us to have issues in several other areas of our life (Wechsler 71).

Facing these pressures leads many teenagers to substance abuse. Alcohol should not be an outlet for the stress that college students endure. This makes way to substance abuse of alcohol. Students tend to think that they can go out and have fun while getting their work done because the first three or four times they did it they were able to finish everything just in time. They also feel as if they can handle all their responsibilities better if they can get relief for just a few hours a night for two or three nights per week (McClellan 810). Suddenly, these students are out getting blackout drunk multiple nights a week (Silveri 190). This can lead teenagers to even believe that they work better after they have been drinking because they had that period to let loose. Then they can focus more on their school work because they are not as stressed out. This can cause the student to believe that they must drink to be able to do their work and they soon become dependent on the alcohol they consume.

Dependency is when the body is so used to having something, like a substance, that the body will go into withdrawals if it does not have what it has become dependent on to function. 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 different 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 regarding 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 (Gogek). 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 (Lubman). The first layer of our brains is responsible for a certain person’s personality. Drinking will first affect your social skills, which is why people become more social when they have consumed alcohol (Lubman). The next layer that is effected deals with coordination. This causes people to stumble when they have been drinking. 

Balance and coordination is 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 (Missouri Safe & Sober). Although this might not seem important, just 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 because 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.

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 (Carbia 9). 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.

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. These layers control different functions.

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 across all 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 our brains are not fully developed until we reach about twenty-four years of age. 

One way to understand this concept of effecting the underage brain is to make a comparison to another substance, like steroids. An 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 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 not only affects our memory but it 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 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 (Mahoney). 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 not just having sex, they are being assaulted. They are neither getting nor giving consent and that is a major issue. Even if the fact that college students consume so much alcohol that they do everything drunk is true, then again, we see the problem. College students should not be consuming alcohol underage. 

For many, if not all teenagers it may seem as if there are few ways to cope with everything that they are going through, but they should understand that alcohol should not be one of those ways. There are several different ways that teenagers can find to help them cope with the pressures that they are feeling. Our society should focus more on helping teenagers find an outlet to their problems and situations that will not cause harm to them in the future (Wechsler 57). Colleges should show case the options that college students have for organizations or events that they can get involved in. It is important that colleges show this to its students as well as encourage students to get involved with these non-destructive extracurricular activities to provide them with the best environment to have a successful future. As peers, we should also encourage our friends to find something that interests them to relieve some of their stress instead of consuming alcohol (Wechsler 93). It is much more believable that there is a different way to handle this issue when it comes from someone our age who is dealing with the same pressures. Though underage alcohol consumption has a negative effect on the brain as well as on multiple behavioral decisions, that does not have to be the fate of teenagers’ futures.
