Prevalence and Effects of Bing Drinking on High School Girls and Adult Women

According to the article published by the CDC, binge drinking is a real public health issue for American women, especially those in high school and early adulthood. Women that binge drank were likely to do so fairly often, generally 3 times a month, and each time would have about 5 drinks. Drunkenness was linked to many issues that made the seriousness of binge drinking among women very clear: a higher risk of unwanted pregnancy, late recognition of said pregnancy, consuming alcohol while pregnant because of late recognition, STIs, and even breast cancer. The data was acquired among high school students via school surveys and among other women via anonymous phone surveys.

I imagine that this is mainly a public health issue because of the prevalence of alcohol consumption among people in high school. Not only are they well below the drinking age, the quantity of alcohol they are consuming will have a long term effect on their bodies, liver damage for example, and may even have immediate effects like unwanted pregnancy. Older women, such as those in college, are almost expected to drink and despite the risk of drinking heavily, no one really bats an eye at the idea of someone drinking in their college years. This problem should also be put forward as an important public health issue simply because not many people really think it as such. When destructive substance use comes to mind, alcohol isn't really up there with cocaine, heroine, etc. Despite the fact that it isn't legal to drink before 21, it is extremely easy to do so and there are very few repercussions even in the event that you are caught. It's as if breaking the law has become normalized, making the severity of the issue difficult to properly capture.

Honestly, the data presented isn't much of a surprise, despite the fact that it isn't even the most reliable. It's not news to anyone that people drink and do so often. What may be slightly disconcerting is how high the numbers were even though they were mostly dishonest. It's very possible that some women lied in their responses to the telephone survey, mainly because of social implications that honesty answers would entail. No person wants to be thought of as a drunk who goes out every weekend, so if the survey is answered, one could assume the responses would be rather tame compared to the actual fact.

For college women, I believe the only way to curb drinking is to properly enforce the drinking age so alcohol is not as easily accessible to them. College students have the risks of alcohol drilled into them was soon as they arrive on campus the same way the dangers of sex are drilled into high schoolers. The risks are simply taken regardless. From personal interactions, people honestly joke about the long term damage to their livers as they drink, it's not anything that's news to them that they need to be enlightened of. Only denying the alcohol acquisition in the first place will be a useful deterrent. As for high school students, restricting how teens get the alcohol is a big part, but a large part also goes to the responsibility of the parents. A fourteen year old generally isn't walking into a liquor store and getting a bottle on their own. Parents need to be more aware of who their children associate with because they definitely have friends that are older than them that allow them to access the alcohol in the first place. The proposed methods of curbing alcohol consumption are no more than inconveniences for people that actually drink responsibly or have nothing to do with the issue, like raising the prices of alcohol and decreasing liquor store density in neighborhoods. These methods just hurt businesses as a whole because of poor decisions made by a few, and seems like a rather unfair method to combat binge drinking among women.