sushii
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2004
- Messages
- 2,415
lolitsjohn said:I don't think I have a real problem yet. Maybe just a seedling of one. I'm 17, a high school senior who gets drunk every weekend. But so does everyone else.
I think this is where the problems begin, for many people. It's totally acceptable - encouraged, even - to go out and get shitfaced on weekends when you're young and of drinking age. It's almost a rite of passage. You're abnormal if you don't do it.
It sounds ridiculous, but I've always been glad I discovered drugs around the time all my friends were going out and getting blind drunk every weekend. Some of them did it for the last few years of highschool all the way through university - and I don't doubt it did damage. Despite the multitude of innaproriate and unhealthy reasons I use alcohol at the moment, I never went through the extreme binge-drinking stage that many of my friends did.
What these cultural expectations regarding alcohol use do, in my opinion, is make it really hard for people to see when they might be developing a problem with their drinking. It also makes it terribly easy to play down or justify alcohol abuse. The onus is on you to come clean and stop drinking - not an easy thing to do for most young people, given how parties and pubs and clubs play such an important social role. Obviously that decision is yours and yours alone when it comes to drug abuse too, it just seems that even mild-to-moderate drug issues are taken more seriously than anything regarding alcohol.