Avalon+E’s+OpEd+Article



=**Why do teenagers find it appealing to get drunk? **=

I honestly do NOT get this idea that teenagers think getting drunk is “fun”. I probably sound like a dork to the majority of high school students, but I cannot seem to grasp this addiction that teenagers have to getting drunk on their Friday and Saturday nights.

Where are these, supposedly, fun parties going to get you in life? I can tell you one thing, it’s not going to assist your admission into your dream college.

In addition to being totally useless towards your future, IT TASTES HORRIBLE (I have only ever had a sip of my mom’s wine, and smelt my dads beer: both were disgusting in my opinion). You don’t choose to eat fish if you hate the taste of fish. So why do you choose the taste of alcohol if you are only going to complain about it, and hate it? Oh yeah, it’s because “there was this really cute senior guy who gave it to me and I tried to act like I liked it but it was seriously disgusting”. Sorry, my bad, I didn’t know you were supposed to obey everything that an upper classman tells you to do. Is that the reason for your drunken habits, because somebody offered it to you?

At the end of my freshman year at VHS, I found it was time to find new friends. The sad part is that I felt I needed a new environment because most of my friends that I have loved since kindergarten began “get turnt” on their Friday nights. Apparently, it is “boring to do the things we did in middle school” according to one of my so-called “best friends forever”.

I’m sure some of you have much different opinions, but what isn’t fun about eating pizza and frozen yogurt while catching up on new episodes of the Bachelor on your Friday nights?! What isn’t fun about searching for driftwood and sea glass on the beach and making cool DIY things with your best friend?! What isn’t fun about having a bonfire on the beach until two o’clock in the morning with your best friend?! Do you really think that getting drunk with your friends and waking up the next morning with no remembrance of the last night is FUN?!

By going to parties and participating in activities that involve alcohol, we are merely putting ourselves at risk. Of the 33,000 people who died in car accidents in 2010, drunk driving caused 11,000 of them. Every day in America, twenty-eight people die as a result of drunk driving crashes. So then why do we continue to get intoxicated with alcohol, when all it is going to do is harm? Even though you may not get in a drunk driving accident, the health hazard of such immense amounts of alcohol are absurd. (Some of the most prominent of these risks include: anemia, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.)

Why do teenagers (and anybody for that matter) find such satisfaction with alcohol? Are those weekends of drunken parties really worth the cancer diagnosis later? We achieve absolutely nothing through the abuse of alcohol consumption, so why do people find getting drunk such a great thing to do?