April Is Alcohol Awareness Month
The Douglas County School System conducts the Georgia Student Health Survey each year. Last year’s survey found that 33 percent of our high school students agreed that alcohol was easily obtainable.
Alcohol use among teens is on the rise. According to the Center for Disease Control, most youth who drink do so to the point of intoxication, typically on multiple occasions. This is known as binge drinking (defined as having five or more drinks on a single occasion).
Just last year a 16-year-old high school female from Douglas County was killed in an alcohol-related car crash, where four people were arrested. Three of the four individuals were teenagers, and adults were charged with allegedly selling liquor to the minors. Another Douglas County related incident occurred at a house party where several teenagers took the life of an 18-year-old young man.
The Douglas County School System conducts the Georgia Student Health Survey each year. Last year’s survey found that 33 percent of our high school students agreed that alcohol was easily obtainable. The survey also reported that parental disapproval for alcohol use was only 79 percent.
Underage drinking is an adult problem with youth suffering the consequences. Parental involvement is at the top of the list for ways to prevent children from starting to drink alcohol. Pre-teens, teens, and young adults must understand that starting to drink alcohol at an early age can have lifelong negative consequences to their physical and mental health, relationships and careers. Adults should consider that they have a responsibility to keep alcohol out of the hands of our young people.
April is Alcohol Awareness month, and the Live Healthy Douglas Coalition and the organizations, agencies, non-profits and citizens members have a month-long plan to educate the community about underage and binge drinking. The Douglas Alcohol Abuse Prevention Initiative (DAAPI) is a new component of the Live Healthy Douglas Coalition, whose mission is “Making Douglas County a drug-free and healthier place to live by reducing youth substance use and improving lifestyle choices through community collaboration, advocacy and education.” DAAPI is part of a state-wide initiative that will assess the community’s youth and young adult use and abuse of alcohol.
I encourage all of you to join in this initiative and show our young people that we do care.
Michelle Harrison,
Associate Juvenile Court Judge of Douglas County
In This article
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Douglas County School System Central Administration Offices
9030 Highway 5, Douglasville, GA
Lisa Frederiksen
4:19 pm on Thursday, April 12, 2012
There is a new eBook out, “Crossing The Line From Alcohol Use to Abuse to Dependence,” that can be used to jump-start conversations on the issues surrounding underage drinking. It simplifies the brain and addiction-related research to debunk the common myths about drinking that can cause a person to drink, cross the line from use to abuse to dependence and/or tolerate the drinking behaviors that result. The science of why addiction is a brain disease, why alcohol abuse causes chemical and structural changes in the brain, why alcohol affects the teen brain differently than the way it affects the adult brain, why relapse is common, why addiction cravings can be more powerful than our instinctual cravings for food, why some people become alcoholics and others stay in alcohol abuse… can make a great deal of difference. It can help young people make different decisions about drinking in the first place, change drinking patterns if they've started, and it can help adults make different decisions about their views on underage drinking, as well.