My deepest apologies to anyone who reads this; I could cite personal problems, but instead I'm going to talk about issues with methods of "alcohol education."
There's this series of pamphlets at my school called "facts on tap," put out by Phoenix House. The two I got are titled "The Naked Truth: Alcohol and Your Body" and "A Risky Relationship: Alcohol and Sex." They have sections called "Just the Frightening Facts, Ma'am" and "Booze Truths," with pictures of a girl pouring something that might be tequila into a (presumably) fellow college student's gaping mouth and two people kissing, the girl with a beer bottle in her hand.
OK, I get it: they're trying to keep bad things from happening to young people. And seriously, that is among the noblest of goals.
But emphasizing only the worst-case scenario is not the way to go about it. And that's what's idiotic about this system: the way it inherently dramatizes and catastrophizes everything. So much AE literature focuses on things like killing people in drunk driving accidents or young women being raped while drunk in the most narrow definition. But, while those things absolutely, certainly happen, there is an enormous grey space in between sobriety and rape or death.
And most bad things that happen when someone or someones is/are have been drinking happen in that grey space. It's the seeds of addiction, it's liver damage, it's (very commonly) ruined relationships. Extremist scare tactics are not the way to teach kids to drink responsibly: the way to do that is to be honest with them. Teach them that drinking can be grand, that it can be a great time, but that they have to be responsible. ("Responsible" here means, first, being willing to drink responsibly, and to not resent it. That's the first thing we need to teach.)
People die in drunk driving accidents all the time. But what's even more common than that are the smaller things that can still change - or even ruin - somebody's life. Or multiple lives. Things like "not-so-bad" sexual assault (hardly anybody wants to admit they think this exists, but lots of people do). Like an irreparable fight with a loved one, be it a friend, significant other, or family member. Like using alcohol as an emotional escape or an excuse to do destructive things.
That's what they don't tell you about. And they tell you that only bad things happen when you drink. They don't tell you about the pitfalls of pleasure that lurk in the grey space: for example and for some, the feeling of peace that comes from being out of control. And that's the problem: most alcohol education programs teach children and teenagers that all alcohol is all-bad, and then when they drink anyway (as teenagers to), and nothing terrible happens, and they have a blast, they disregard the possibility of something bad occurring. That, coupled with most adolescents' "nothing-bad-can-happen-to-me" complex and the feeling that they're doing what they're supposed to do by partying like crazy, is a major part of what causes drunk driving deaths. And cirrhosis of the liver. And all the rest.
