CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS
By far, alcohol is the
drug used most often by
high school students. Although most
seniors cannot buy alcohol legally, 80 percent of them have tried alcohol and about one in five report that they have drunk heavily (more than five drinks in a row) in the past two weeks. This is actually good news, because the number of teens drinking
heavily has declined somewhat in
recent years. But that's not the
end of the story. Recent studies show that among
students who engaged in heavy drinking, half had consumed ten or more drinks in one episode and a quarter had consumed fifteen. So, while heavy drinking at the
"low" end of the scale
(about five drinks in an episode) has
declined recently, the rates of extreme heavy drinking have remained high.
The
story among college students is not as
simple as the media sometimes portray.
Reports of "binge drinking" among college students can be misleading. First, the term hinge drinking is a bad one. Many people think of an alcohol
binge as a period of several days
during which a person stays drunk nearly
all the time. This, of course, is a very dangerous pattern of drinking but is not what is meant by
the media when they report on binge drinking among
college students. In that context, binge drinking refers to a man hay
The problems
associated with underage drinking are well known, and in recent years research
has continued to show that alcohol affects the brain of younger people very differently from the way it affects that of
adults. Part of this may be related
to brain development. For example, we know that the brain does not finish developing until
a person is in his midtwenties and
that one of the last regions to mature is the frontal lobe area, which is intimately involved with the
ability to plan and make complex
judgments. Young brains also have rich resources for acquiring new memories and seem to be "built to
learn." It is no accident that people in our society are educated during their early years, when they have more capacity for memory and learning. However, with
this greater memory capacity come
additional risks associated with the use of alcohol. Studies using animals have shown that when the brain is
young, it is more susceptible to
some of the dangerous effects of alcohol, especially on learning and memory function. And one study in humans
showed that people in their early
twenties were more vulnerable to the effects of alcohol on learning than were people just a few years older,
in their late twenties. So it appears
that children and adolescents who drink are powerfully impairing the brain functions on which they rely so
heavily for learning. This is already indicated by very detailed cellular
studies on learning-related brain
regions. In these studies (which, of course, can only be done using brain tissue from animals), it is clear that
alcohol decreases the ability of brain circuits to change in the ways they must
for learning to basic cellular functioning occur far more strongly
when the alcohol expo‑sure
occurs during adolescence, compared to adulthood. In other words,it
appears that adolescence is not only a time when single doses of alcohol affect
the brain differently but also a time of enhanced vulnerability to the
long-term effects of repeated alcohol exposure—even down to the level
of individual brain cells. This adds to a strong and growing scientific literature
that tells us that adolescents should hold off on drinking.
Another very good
reason for teens to hold off on drinking is that there is a very strong
relationship between the age
at which one starts to drink and the likelihood of
developing dependence on alcohol. People who start
drinking
in their early to midteens are far more likely to develop alcohol
dependency,
and to experience recurring episodes of dependency, than
are people who start
drinking at age twenty-one or older. There are certainly a number of reasons for this increased
risk, and not all of them are biological, but it is clear from animal studies
that adolescents develop tolerance to
some of alcohol's effects more rapidly than adults. In humans this could lead to a greater motivation to drink
repeatedly. So, although it has always
been controversial, our current state laws requiring a person to be twenty-one to drink make good sense from this perspective.
Most parents tend
to be clueless when it comes
to their children's drinking. For
example, while 52 percent of tenth graders report having drunk alcohol in the past year, only 10 percent of parents of tenth graders believe that their child has consumed alcohol in
that period. Interestingly, parents
report believing that about 60 percent
of tenth graders have consumed
alcohol within the past year. So parents actually tend to overestimate the proportion of kids who drink—they just don't think it's their kids who are drinking! There are similar gaps between older teens' reported drinking and parents' beliefs about their
drinking. Parents of twelfth graders are starting to see the light, but they
still underestimate their kids'
drinking significantly. The important message for parents is that alcohol is out there and its use is getting thrust at their children from many angles. Talk to your children about them.
WİLKİE WİLSON
