Brent Hardy

October 23, 2002

Illustrative Essay

Audience: Liberal College Students

The Imaginary Danger of Teenage Drinking

            Many people talk about a problem with teenage drinking in America. I don’t think that that any such problem exists. Proportionally, there is an insignificant number of teenagers who are harmed by use of alcohol abuse. Despite prevalent use of alcohol among teenagers there are relatively few deaths that occur, which says that alcohol use is not a serious problem among teenagers.

            Statistically, there is no cause for alarm at the fatality rate among teenage drinkers. Surveys have shown that about 93% of students experiment with alcohol. According to studies, about 4,700 teens died as a result of a motor vehicle crash in 1999, and there were about 28,100,000 teenagers in the country. That boils down to this simple statistic: even if every teenager who died in a motor vehicle accident did so under the influence of alcohol, that was still only about 0.018% of the teenage population of America. Given the numbers involved, this is actually an insignificant number. This proves that teenagers, though given to experimentation with alcohol, do not have a major alcohol problem.

            Looking at teenagers, we tend to focus on the negative behaviors. We don’t notice the things that we have taught them to do right, especially drinking habits. We portray to kids that it is, in fact, cool to drink. We show them this in movies, television, even radio broadcasts. However, we also show them proper drinking habits, for the most part. When a character on a popular television show drinks and drives, they either wreck or get pulled over by the police. This shows the negative consequences to teens, and they pick up on this.

            For instance, a young teenage guy goes to a small party with some of his friends. The friends are all drinking, and he decides to join in. However, after the party he calls his parents and they come to pick him up, happy that he didn’t try to drive home in his intoxicated state.

            A young couple goes out to a nice bar for their anniversary. Instead of driving a long way, however, they walk down the street to the bar where they met, had a nice meal and some drinks, and walk back to their apartment to watch a movie.

            A young woman gets a nice, high-paying job and wants to celebrate. She has a few friends over to her home and they drink a little while watching movies. After the movies are over, she offers for her friends to spend the night so they won’t have to drive home. They all accept and the party continues.

            All these examples show that a teenager can drink responsibly. These examples are, in fact, common occurrences in our society. However, these are not the types of examples featured on the news, because they happen too often. The norm is that nobody dies. The teens that don’t drink responsibly are the ones that are unusual, and the unusual is what is featured on the ten o’clock news.

            This doesn’t even get into the fact that some teens don’t drink at all. The statistics show how many have experimented with alcohol, not how many teens drink on a regular basis. If a person has just tried a mixed drink once in their life, they would be counted among this 93%. For instance, I have a friend who went to Europe over the summer last year. She refused to drink when all her friends went to clubs, instead having coke or water. However, on the night before she came back to the States, she went out to a nice restaurant. As was her habit, she ordered Coke. Unfortunately, she didn’t know that the management had a habit of pouring a little something…extra…in the drinks at that particular restaurant. She kept on getting refills of Coke with rum in it. Of course, she wouldn’t have drank it if she’d have known, but she had no idea what rum tastes like, and assumed it was just an irregularity in the flavor. She would fit statistically in that 93% even though she has never willingly even tried alcohol.

            As always, there are abnormal cases. In a video shown in driver’s education classes across the country, a friend goes to a party, doesn’t drink, and takes his inebriated friend’s keys away from him. He then proceeds to drive the friend home, at which point the friend suddenly grabs the steering wheel and jerks, causing the car to swerve into the path of an oncoming truck. The occupants of the car all died. This example does more to show the hazards of pure, random chance than the danger of drinking. Such an instance could happen with a small child, or bringing your mother home from back surgery. Neither would be in any condition to realize that grabbing the wheel may cause the deaths of all the occupants of the car. The chances of anything like this happening is absurdly low, about the same as the chance of a drunk car crashing through the lobby of an office building and running over workers.

            American teenagers drink. Many of them drink socially; some even have alcohol abuse problems. However, that’s a personal issue for them. Stating that alcoholism is a national problem gives rise to the decrease of the availability of alcohol, a serious infringement of each individual’s right to choose whether or not to drink. Alcohol is not a problem among teenagers because, as a whole, they know the proper way to handle themselves, and do not present a threat to the safety of society.