Orange R

Alcohol Ugly

Mikayla Carter, Staff Writer
March 20, 2012
Filed under Opinion

It is not awesome to be an idiot, it is not awesome to get “wasted”. I walked into my history class looking forward to learning about the Russian Revolution, but all I could hear was the student sitting beside me talking about the alcohol they ingested over the weekend. The student talked about their massive hangover and how awful they felt. They thought they were so cool. Well, here’s your wake-up call; I don’t think you’re cool, no one does.

What is “cool” about alcohol? It makes you feel and do things that are abnormal to your nature. That is the only advantage to alcoholic consumption, and it’s hardly an advantage. There are truly no others. With one simple, few-worded sentence I can list the positive effects of teenage drinking. The defects on the other hand, don’t hold such a short list. Liver disease, heart attack, bowel cancer, breast cancer, brain damage, etc. The list goes on-and-on. So is it worth it?

Over 5,000 people under the age of 21 die as a result of underage drinking every year. Alcohol damages your DNA and from that spawns mutated cells. In turn, the mutated cells build up and form a tumor, the tumor spreads, which could cause death. That’s how cancer works, and that’s how alcohol causes it. You don’t even have to drink a lot of alcohol to cause damaged DNA; just a few drinks can do the trick.

There are advertisements for this dirty substance everywhere you turn; perhaps it’s the governments way of population control. I believe we are born knowing the boundaries between right and wrong; we know what we should and should not do. By drinking alcohol, we are not only doing damage to our organs, but to our brain as well. With every drink, you decrease you own I.Q. That tipsy feeling can only go on for so long before it becomes permanent, and you are no longer a “fun drunk”, but instead a waste of what started out as a perfectly stable human being. You’ve ruined yourself and can never return to that fully functional state.

There are a million and one reasons not to drink: it doesn’t look cool, it gives you permanent red patches on you face, causes you to gain weight, you acquire permanent brain damage, and it kills you a hundred different ways. The time to stop it is now, you are not gone yet. Don’t let it consume you, as you consume it. Put an end to its destruction on your body, and live your life the way it is meant to be lived: healthily.