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Youth alcohol addiction is a progressive debilitating disease by teenagers and young adults between the ages of 12 and 20. Alcoholism, no matter whether the individual is a youth or an adult, is defined by the following four main components:

· Tolerance - the need to drink increasingly more amounts of alcohol in order to get to get “high” or to get a “buzz.”

· Loss of control – the inability to stop drinking once the individual has started drinking.

· Craving - a strong need or compulsion to drink alcohol.

· Physical dependence – experiencing withdrawal symptoms, such as the shakes, headaches, nausea, or excessive sweating after stopping drinking.

youth alcohol addiction

It is essentially ordinary knowledge that the legal drinking age throughout the United States is 21. According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, nonetheless, almost 80% of high school students have had one or more alcoholic beverages.

Not only can alcohol affect the mind and body in unpredictable ways, but teens lack the judgment and coping skills to handle alcohol logically.

According to a National Institute of Health study, people who start drinking at a young age are not only more likely to develop alcohol addiction within 10 years of when they first started to drink, but they are also at an increased risk during any year of adulthood for developing alcoholism.

Aside from the fact that underage drinking is against the law, it poses a high risk to both the individual and society.

negative consequences

The following represents some of the dangerous consequences of teenage alcoholism:

· Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among teens ages 15 to 20. In fact, the rate of fatal crashes among alcohol-involved drivers between the ages of 16 and 20 years old is more than twice the rate for alcohol-involved drivers 21 and older.

· Teenage binge drinkers are significantly more likely to become heavy drinkers as adults and find themselves with a string of criminal sentences.

· Trouble with the law: Underage drinking cannot only cause personal hardships, but it can also get teens in trouble with the legal system. As an illustration, drinking and driving can get your license suspended or worse.

· Youth who abuse alcohol are more likely to have problems with school work and school conduct.

· More than three times the number of eighth-grade girls who drink in a hazardous manner said they have attempted suicide as compared to girls in that grade who do not drink.

· Memory loss and blackouts. This is quite usual during teenager binge drinking, but it can occur afterwards too, when the teenager is has metabolized his or her alcohol.

· Lack of judgment. Unfortunately, many teens who engage in hazardous drinking make terrible decisions. Illustrations include drinking and driving, sleeping with someone without protection, or sleeping with multiple partners. In the best case situation, they have an embarrassing predicament to live with. In the worst case circumstance, they end up in the obituaries.

· Loss of friends. Hazardous drinking can radically transform an individual’s personality. One outcome of this is that his or her friends may simply stop hanging out with him or her due to the abusive drinking behavior.

· Research suggests that alcohol abuse by the offender, the victim or both, increases the chance of sexual assault by a male friend.

· Motor vehicle crashes are the number one killer for teens between the ages of 15-20 and the number of fatal crashes caused by DWIs is double for this age group when compared with drivers over the age of 21.

· An individual who begins drinking as a young teen is four times more likely to develop alcohol dependence than someone who waits until adulthood to use alcohol.

· A recent study demonstrated the prevalent nature of adolescent drinking and reveals that alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence may be more pervasive than formerly thought.

reckless drinking

Rather than trying to stop all teens from drinking alcohol (because alcohol consumption is something that is almost universally done by American teens), prevention efforts might more profitably target alcohol abuse, particularly in conjunction with adolescents’ tendency to drink with friends and with acquaintances. And a special focus should be made on the most common forms of abusive drinking behavior such as drinking and driving, binge drinking, and drinking while engaging in illicit drug use.

To ensure long lasting reductions in teenage drinking, more forceful parental, community, and societal efforts to reinforce prevention messages are clearly needed. Such efforts could range from closer parental supervision of youths’ parties to combating media images that associate drinking with popularity, high status, good times, and glamor.

The message is apparent: alcohol use is very dicey for adolescents. The longer teenagers delay alcohol use, additionally, the less likely they are to develop any problems that are associated with alcohol abuse or addiction to alcohol.