What Is Alcohol Abuse?
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Springfield High School: Kyle, Gage, and Shane
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SPEAKER 1: How many times a month do you deal with drugs? SPEAKER 2: Probably about four or five times a month I deal with somebody that either has drugs or is under the influence of drugs or alcohol. SPEAKER 1: [indecipherable] SPEAKER 2: I’d say I get sent about two kids a week suspected of using drugs or alcohol. SPEAKER 1: [indecipherable] SPEAKER 2: Marijuana is still probably the most popular of the main drugs. But also we’re seeing an increase in prescription drug use. We’ve dealt with “bath salts” and all the hardcore drugs, too. Calls for people abusing Coricidin tablets. But marijuana is still the number-one drug.

Alcohol has been part of human society for thousands of years. Alcohol is used during times of joy, such as a wedding celebration. It is also used during times of sadness, for example, when mourning a death. It is used as part of social rituals that bring people together—family dinnertime at home, a meal at a restaurant with friends, a business lunch to seal a deal. It is used to stimulate social interaction, such as at clubs and bars where people go to dance and meet other people. It is used to relax after a long day at work, and to wash away many of the stresses of daily living.

By the NumbersAccording to statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2019 (the most recent data available) 29 percent of high school students reported drinking alcohol within the past month, and 14 percent reported binge drinking. Alcohol use is so common that it is easy to forget that alcohol is a drug—a very dangerous drug.

In the United States and Canada, alcohol is the most commonly used drug; it is also the most commonly abused. According to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), about one in eight children and teens younger than seventeen years old is exposed to alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence in the family.

When a person abuses a substance, it means that they use it improperly. There are right ways and wrong ways to use alcohol. Binge drinking—or drinking more than four or five drinks during a single occasion—is one of the wrong ways.

Underage Drinking

Drinking illegally, before you turn the legal age to drink, is another wrong way to use alcohol. In the United States, it is illegal for anyone under age twenty-one to buy or consume alcohol. In Canada, the drinking age is eighteen or nineteen, varying by province or territory. In spite of the law, people under the legal drinking age find ways to obtain alcohol. Often, underage drinkers consume alcohol not for social rituals but for a single purpose: to get drunk. According to SAMHSA, seven million American teens between the ages of twelve and twenty use alcohol, even though it’s illegal for them to do so. Maybe you drink alcohol, too. If you drink regularly, you will need more and more alcohol to feel drunk on a single occasion. This means you are at risk of becoming a binge drinker.

Because it’s illegal, underage drinking is usually done in secret. This can lead to isolation; drug dependency; trouble at home, school, and work; or life-altering conditions resulting from accidents or alcohol poisoning. According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, alcohol is involved as a factor in the three leading causes of teenage death: accidents, homicide, and suicide.

Reality CheckThink about that. The top three things that cause teens to die are related to alcohol in some way. So it’s not as simple as just getting drunk—illegally or otherwise. And it’s clearly not that easy to control. Each year, alcohol abuse contributes heavily to traffic fatalities and to domestic violence. Of course, it also causes alcoholism, a disease that affects millions of Americans and Canadians. Alcohol abuse is often a factor in criminal behavior and in unplanned or unwanted sexual activity. Some of this sexual activity accounts for the dramatic spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among teens.

There is some good news, however. In 2021, the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s annual Monitoring the Future survey found a steady decline in alcohol use among teens over the past thirty years. In 1991, 54 percent of twelfth graders said that they had used alcohol in the past month, but by 2021 that number had dropped to 25 percent. The same cannot be said of other substances, however. For example, marijuana use remained steady over the same time period.

When it comes to alcohol use, it seems that teens handled the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic better than adults. Research published in 2021 found that among adults twenty-one years and older, excessive drinking increased by 24 percent in the first six months of the pandemic. Yet teens’ alcohol use declined slightly during that same period, even though most students surveyed said they still had the same level of access to alcohol as before. As the pandemic continued, alcohol use among teens decreased significantly, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.