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Teenage drinking and drug-takingThe Guardian newspaper in the UK invited people to send in their opinions about the phenomenon of young teenagers turning to drink and drugs. Below is a selection of some of those opinions: I'm 27. Since the age of about 13 I've been drinking and smoking. Why? Let me attempt to answer. My generation's culture is accelerating at a pace never before experienced. We have instant solutions to everything. We want information - we log onto the net. We want to contact someone - we have our mobile phone. We want entertainment - we turn on the TV or the games console. With so many ways to instantly gratify ourselves is it any wonder than when things aren't going so well we turn to the quickest solution: drink and drugs? I am sickened by teenagers who blame society for their drinking habits. These kids say that society doesn't provide enough for them and that they are bored and that's why they turn to drink and drugs. Well, I grew up in a rural village that had absolutely nothing: no bars, cinemas, sports centres, youth clubs - NOTHING! But we didn't take drugs and I had my first drink when I was 17. Boredom is no excuse. Let's remember how influential TV can be. Inevitably TV shows things that look good on the screen. This means they focus on people doing crazy things, being hip and generally acting like a true party animal. Filming university lecturers talking about good books is no way to attract a mass audience. Repeatedly kids are bombarded with images implying that life is about excitement and craziness - a message that entails a total disregard for the virtues that stop adult society falling apart. This must make young people nowadays much more demanding than kids in the past, and it must make them much more likely to look for easy ways of forgetting the thorougly unexciting demands of adult life. All 14-year-olds want to do is go out and do exactly what the 18 year olds are doing. I am constantly hearing tales from my friend's 14-year-old sister about how she's been sick in a club and can't remember what happened. She thinks it's great, and says it's what everybody does. She also tells me that the most popular radio station in the UK has a programme on Saturday morning where teenagers regularly phone in and talk to the DJ about how drunk they got the previous night. Everybody just laughs. If your future is going to consist of fifty or sixty years stuck in a tedious 9 to 5 job like a rat on a treadmill, chemicals are the way to go. When I was young I turned to drink for the following reasons: I always felt like an outsider. Teachers and adults never valued my thoughts and contributions, I was a second class citizen because of my age. Yet when I went out at the weekend and drank I forgot all about that, and for a few hours I felt on top of the world. In Holland there isn't this idea that sex, drink and drugs (at least soft drugs) are something bad. The whole system is more relaxed and people are much more open about these issues. Of course there are problems but I don't think the solution is stricter legislation. Britain has much stricter legislation and the problems there are far worse. Take teenage pregnancies as an example. The age of consent for sex in the UK is 16, whereas in Holland it is 12, and we have the lowest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe. CLICK HERE for a little vocabulary revision. NEXT ARTICLE - "How serious is the problem?" PREVIOUS ARTICLE - "Scott Douglas' story" | |