Substance abuse: Alcohol Consumption and alcohol dependence among the youth

. Literature used.

Reasons for choosing this topic.

Though all people know the truth about the unprecedented guile of alcohol drinks, many of them fall in its skilfully set up traps. This is because of the character of alcohol, which can force to like itself, despite its harmful, sick and dissolute nature.

One sage said: “Wine brings four qualities to everyone, who drinks it.

In the beginning, a person starts looking like a peacock- he puffs, his motions are sail and dignified. Then, he gains a nature of a monkey and begins jesting and playing with everyone. Afterwards, he likens himself with a lion and becomes presumptuous, proud, sure of his power. But at the end he changes into a pig and wallows in dirt”.

The worst thing is that drunkards and alcoholics, being carriers of negative views and stereotypes of antisocial behaviour, not only constantly break the rules and norms of behaviour in different scopes of vital activity of people, but also actively promote the involvement in the drunkenness people around them, especially young.

It is stated by many studies that each drunkard and alcoholic renders demoralising influence on the average of 4-5 persons from the nearest ambience.

For many centuries people tried to find the most effective facilities and ways of protecting the humanity from the ruinous influence of alcohol.

They tried to develop measures on eliminating the multiple bad consequences of drunkenness and alcoholism, primarily the measures on rescuing, bringing back to a normal life a constantly increasing number of victims of alcohol.

The history of anti-alcoholic struggle has left many examples of using in these purposes different measures up to such radical, as a conclusion of drunkards in prisons, their physical punishment, executions, full prohibition of production and selling of alcohol drinks, e.t.c. However, a consumption of alcohol continued to grow steadily, covering new groups and layers of populations.

On the one hand one can suggest a continuous growing of the world alcohol consumption to be due to a weak efficiency of measures used by the mankind against the dangerous social phenomena, on the other – due to a significant reinforcement of reasons and conditions, causing the broad masses of population to fall in the alcohol dependence.

Until a recent time, the insufficient theoretical development of questions, associated with spreading of an alcoholic consumption, one-sided explanation of reasons of drunkenness and alcoholism rendered a negative influence upon the contents and direction of anti-alcoholic struggle, on its strategy and tactics. Practice of an anti-alcoholic struggle shows that solving of concrete questions on warning and a displacing the negative phenomenas is impossible without a deep study of the reasons, causing consumption of alcohol beverages and promoting spreading a drunkenness and alcoholism.

That is why I chose this topic to be discussed in my work. I really consider it to be a social problem almost as essential as the drug dependence. Unfortunately, I have a lack of time and experience to cover all the aspects of it and to make a deep sociological investigation, but nevertheless I’ll try to do my best.

The concept of alcohol.

What is alcohol?

The active ingredient in all alcoholic beverages is ethyl ethanol

(alcohol), which is produced by yeast cells acting on carbohydrates in fruits and grains. Ethyl alcohol works much like ether, acting as an anaesthetic to put the brain to sleep. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant that slows down body functions such as heart rate and respiration. Small quantities of alcohol may induce feelings of well being and relaxation; but in larger amounts, alcohol can cause intoxication, sedation, unconsciousness and even death. There are three types of alcoholic beverages:

* Beer is fermented from grains and contains three to six percent alcohol.* Wine is fermented from fruit and normally contains 12 to 14 percent alcohol. Fortified wines have additional alcohol added and contain 18 to 20 percent alcohol. Wine coolers are a mixture of fruit juice, sugar, and red or white wine, and contain four to seven percent alcohol (approximately the same alcoholic content as beer)

* Liquor is made from distilled (boiled off) alcohol and contains 40 to 50 percent alcohol. This is expressed as degrees of proof (two proof equals one percent alcohol). For example, 80 proof liquor is 40 percent alcohol.

Factors that influence alcohol’s effect.