Quote:
Originally Posted by 33girl
Ree-xi -
As you said, "18-19 year olds have so much to learn." Do you feel that book learning about drinking is adequate? I don't. The only way you can learn about your drinking limits is to drink. The drinking laws as they stand now are like declaring cadavers illegal and asking medical students to go right from reading a book on heart surgery to operating on a live person.
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33GIRL - I meant that they have so much to learn in terms of life experience. Without those extra few years of "life", a time when you are learning to control your impulses, understand that there are consequences of your actions, etc., giving them something that will impair their judgment (which will liekly happen after consuming more than one drink in a shorter amount of time) is like adding gasoline to the fire.
I absolutely do not think that simply book learning or a single school assembly will be effective for most young adults.
Perhaps a course - a la driver's ed - should be part of a high school curriculum. It can be a few weeks long.
Years ago, our local radio station did an exercise on the morning radio show. The female DJ would have a drink every 20 minutes or so, and they tested her BAC and her ability to do mundane tasks (such as adding). It was done in a "funny" way, but what came out of it was very serious. They were trying to demonstrate to the audience that after a few drinks, verbal, motor and judgment skills were thrown off considerably, and her BAC rose MUCH faster than even she thought.
The bottom line is that kids need to be SHOWN how alcohol acts on the body. I don't advocate letting kids experiment at 16 (again, the brain is still developing). But we need to be responsible and let them know that alcohol is not an innocent entity.
I think THAT is the problem. Like someone said, when kids first drive, we don't just hand them the keys and let them go.
Because alcohol can and does lead to poor decisions and ultimately death, there needs to be more education. Hands-on education. A session on the biology on alcohol's effects on the body, a session on how to use alcoohol responsibly - as in one an hour, drinking water in between, etc.), a session about the law, accidents, featuring a police officer and maybe an ER doctor. Use pictures, videos of crashes and crash victims. I saw a commercial for an insurance company that said 16,000 kids will die in motor accidents this year, with the visual of thousands of cars driving away and never coming home. Pretty gut-wrenching.
I don't know the perfect balance of books and experience, but if the parents are not teaching respect for the drink at home, the school systems need to pick it up. We are losing too many kids to alcohol.
Hybrid Mode
