According to Crittenton Hospital’s records, fifty percent of all teenagers seen in the emercency room are from alcohol-related injuries (1). The average teenager takes their first sip of alcohol at the age of thirteen (Crittenton Hospital 1). This is really chilling because of all the harmful effect alcohol has on a young person’s body. Alcohol causes problems with the stomach, pancreas, liver and other internal organs. Not to mention what alcohol does to a person while drinking it. Alcohol causes blurred vision, bad breath, it makes a person’s face red and puffy, and it makes your stomach bloated. All those empty calories in alcohol can give a person what is called a “beer belly”. Alcohol robs a person of the abil

Another solution to teenagers that still need to grow up and mature before drinking alcohol would be better police enforcement. Police departments have thought of programs to prevent teens from getting alcohol. One program is called “Cops N’ Shops.” This is a program in which an undercover police officer will pose as a cashier in a store. This enables an officer to arrest any teen using a fake, altered or borrowed Id. Police officers also walk through bars or restaurants in plain clothes to spot underage drinkers or corrupt bartenders. A program called “Party Patrols” involves faculty at high schools and universities that tip off police to underage drinkers planning a party. Undercover police officers can attend the gathering or survey the location and make arrests. Yet, in a culture that views alcohol consumption as a part of growing up, even those tasked with enforcing laws may overlook violations. “The loss of life, property damage, economic costs and negative health effects associated with underage drinking as well as a public outcry for attention, provide sufficient reasons to make the illegal use of alcohol by teens a greater concern for police” (Little and Bishop 1).

Alcohol and a college student is a very costly mix. Many young college students are not yet mature enough to manage school and drinking alcohol. Drinking alcohol in college is considered a “rite of passage”. Therefore, college students don’t feel they’ve had the whole college experience unless they drink alcohol. The Madd Organization reports that each year, students spend $5.5 billion on alcohol, more than they spend on soft drinks, tea, milk, juice, coffee or books combined. On a typical campus a student spends about $446 a year for alcohol. Not only are college students spending so much money on alcohol but they are also killing themselves with it. According to Crittenton Hospital, Four Michigan college students died from alcohol-related incidents since October ’98, including one from Michigan State University after drinking twenty-four shots of alcohol on his birthday (1). At Ferris State University, a twenty-year-old dental hygiene student fell out of her 48” × 32” bedroom window after drinking hard liquor. Her blood alcohol content level was 0.22 - twice as high as the legal limit for driving! Alarmingly, alcohol interferes with a person’s ability to learn. Students involved with alcohol are less likely to be effective in their education. This is really sad because the cost of a college education is extremely high and because of the irresponsible use of drinking alcohol, students are not getting all that they could be getting from their classes. As reported by the MADD Organization, alcohol is associated with forty percent of all academic problems and twenty-eight percent of all dropouts. College students who reported D and E grade point averages consumed an average of ten alcoholic drinks per week, while those who earned mostly A’s consumed slightly more than three drinks per week (5 “Research on Youth…”). To put this in other words, failing college students drink three times as much as passing students. Frightfully, alcohol clouds a young, immature person’s judgement and robs them of the ability to think or react right. Proof of this fact is teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

A solution to stop immature underage drinkers would be strict supervision from their parents. Parents should be involved in their teen’s social life. Parents were teens once and they know the kinds of things teenag

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