Drinking to a dependence: Alcohol at AHS

*student names altered for privacy

It might start at a party or in your own home. Maybe your friend hands it to you for the first time. Or maybe you reach for it yourself. Regardless of where it begins, alcohol is almost magnetic in American teen culture. People feel pressured or liberated to begin the habit young as a result.

“I was nine or ten the first time [I drank alcohol],” senior Alexander Victor said. “At my friend’s house, we made a plan to steal her mom’s wine. It was fun, we drew a whole map of the house to make sure no one heard us.”

As Victor got older, alcohol took over more of his life. His relationship with alcohol hit rock bottom in his freshman year.

“My friends and I would steal alcohol from local stores every weekend,” Victor said. “We were drinking on weekdays, during school. I was putting myself in dangerous situations to access alcohol.”

Low self-esteem and a friend group with similar struggles allowed Victor’s problem to flourish. “We weren’t going to parties or anything,” Victor said. “We were just sitting in fields and getting incredibly drunk.” 

Mental health struggles commonly lead to alcohol abuse. “I kinda worry about a lot of stuff, day to day,” junior Andrew Lee said. “I’m not the kind of person to just let stuff go. But I think drinking helped me to let stuff go and made me a calmer person.”

Junior Johnathan Miller points out the “competition aspect” of drinking, often seen in party settings. “Alcohol is like a sport, and this is JV,” Miller said. “College is Varsity; it’s like we’re practicing.”

The competition mindset encourages people to push their limits and abandon self-interest. “You shouldn’t encourage your peers to drink until the point where they are poisoning themselves,” Miller said. “But, it’s like, you can’t go to college and not be able to drink at all. You don’t want to be a b-tch in college, so you [keep drinking].”

The illegality of underage drinking forms a spectacle, pushing young people to want to engage with alcohol more.  

“The stigma about not being able to drink until you’re 21 makes people wanna do it because the natural mindset is to defy rules,” Lee said. 

America differs from many other countries in setting the drinking age at 21. 

“In a lot of European countries, there’s no drinking age,” Nurse Johnny Kell said. “They also have way lower rates of alcoholism, because their kids have been interacting with it for so long.” 

As a result of the temptation caused by our drinking age, teens are more likely to overindulge in alcohol when they gain access to it. 

“People will try it for the first time and think, ‘alright, well I’m doing it, I might as well get really really drunk,’ and it just escalates super fast,” Lee said. “I think once people have one drink, they want another, and most people don’t know their limits.”

Excessive drinking is common amongst high school students, being quite prominent in party culture. Students feel pressured to keep up with those around them, ignoring their bodies’ signals to stop.

The CDC defines “binge drinking” as consuming three to five drinks or more in one sitting. As explained by Nurse Johnny Kell, the definition of “one drink” varies from an ounce of liquor, four to six ounces of wine, or 12 ounces of 5% beer. Additionally, local brews and IPAs vary drastically in alcohol content, some having up to or over 10% alcohol, turning one beer into two.

The dependence on alcohol emerging from this cycle can lead individuals to take up drinking alone. Drinking alone is an early symptom of addiction. 

“I think people get stuck in this loop, and they feel like without alcohol, they don’t have that same spark that they had at the party,” senior Liam Clark said. “Then once you’re down and you don’t feel the same, you start thinking about yourself more critically.”

Kell defines this cycle as a “negative feedback loop,” where one becomes reliant on a harmful behavior to help alleviate the symptoms that arise as a result of the harmful behavior. “A positive feedback loop would be taking a walk, talking to a friend, exercising to get your endorphins flowing. Endorphins are powerful; they are your body’s own drug, and they reward positive behaviors.”

Students access alcohol through a variety of means. Older siblings, friends of friends, and dealers provide underage individuals with alcohol. But if those avenues fail, minors may take matters into their own hands.

“Bottle runs” is a term that describes stealing alcohol from a store. The practice relies on a ‘no chase policy,’ which asserts that employees cannot follow shoplifters out of the store to protect against liabilities.

“I watched someone put a bottle in his waistband and just walk out,” Kell said. “I looked up at an employee, and they just said, ‘I can’t do anything.’”

In Humboldt, young people have broad access to substances, correlating with the county’s record-breaking marijuana production. Many parents in the county will try to get ahead of the inevitable curiosity by being the first to introduce their children to substances in a controlled environment.   

“There are a lot of people who have parents that don’t care [about substance use], so they’re able to have friends over to drink,” Lee said. “There are a lot of parents who have raised their kids, drinking with them, smoking with them, and I think they just don’t see it as an issue. But that encourages other kids to do it too.”

The practice of introducing substances to one’s children in a controlled environment could be beneficial in facilitating healthy relationships with those substances. However, providing children with the substances unregulated encourages addiction in youth. Clark pointed to one of his freshman peers whose father bought her her first bong before she reached middle school. 

“She’s addicted to opiates and stuff like that, and alcohol, and is kind of romanticizing becoming an alcoholic,” Clark said. “You can see there are highs in that kind of relationship with alcohol, but then you see the instant lows. You only really see them at their happiest when on some sort of substance.”

Addiction can be invisible to the addict. As teenagers, it’s difficult for students to understand when they are struggling with alcoholism. 

“I definitely think that addiction can be hard to self-recognize,” Lee said. “Maybe they don’t have friends who can let them know about that, or friends who are involved in the same thing don’t think it’s an issue.”

Students who are struggling with alcoholism and addiction in general often are unsure of how to navigate the problem, fearing repercussions if they do seek help. 

“People don’t know where to go,” Lee said. “People are scared of getting arrested for something or getting in trouble. They’re hoping they can ignore the problem, and it’ll be better if they don’t say anything.” 

Addiction continues to plague our students, though not for lack of effort. “I’ll have kids tell me, ‘I’ll try to quit this weekend. I’ll try to leave it with a friend,’” Kell said. “They’re trying. They’re struggling.”

Experimenting is a common symptom of teenage invincibility, but the consequences of indulging in substances too young can be much deeper than people realize.

“I harp on alcohol and nicotine so much because they rewire your brain,” Kell said. “If your brain gets rewired towards addiction when you’re in high school, then what happens when you’re a little older and your friend offers you cocaine? You’ve already been set up to latch onto it.”

Today, Victor is grateful to have been able to improve his relationship with alcohol.

“I don’t put myself in dangerous situations to get drunk anymore,” Victor said. “I haven’t in over 2 years. I definitely still struggle with wanting to feel that comfort with alcohol…But it gets to the point where you realize, when you reach an age to have it completely available, and you’re going through a tough time, it’ll be the first thing you reach for.”