Do you remember graduating high school? Remember all the questions you had to ask yourself. What are you going to do now? Do you want to work? Do you want to go to school again for another four years? These questions are eventually answered and some choose to find a job, and others figure out that going to college is probably a good thing. Now you have realized that you want to get a taste of college life and you're back to where you started. Where do you get the money? Where do you want to go? What are you really going to get out of this? Finally you make your decisions and you now find yourself away from home in a new environment, living the college life.

College is a time where tough decisions are to be made and these choices can change the direction of your life. It is a time where in most cases students get a taste of the real world by being away from home for the first time with a new found freedom to live as they please. College life is a new experience and the pressures that come along with it have an effect on a student's path to success. Unfortunately, alcohol is one of these pressures. Alcohol abuse is a major problem that many young men and women encounter throughout t

Our education systems have placed an emphasis on learning in a classroom. Yet learning how to add numbers and how to write papers are not the only things we must learn to become mature. The point is that there are other things we must learn in a classroom. This includes the understanding of how alcohol can effect our futures.

Preventing alcohol abuse among students should be through education of the problems that come about from alcohol, not by just simply saying that drinking is wrong. Saying that it is wrong to drink before reaching the legal age will not prevent our young adults from abusing alcohol. The only outcome of this is that we will have young adults abusing alcohol legally, as soon as they reach the age of twenty-one. Abstinence does not educate our college students of the dangers that are caused by the use of alcohol; it only makes them ignorant to what can happen. Education can be in the form of health forums, increasing alcohol awareness on campus and the creation of prevention programs. These are all far superior alternatives to promoting abstinence from alcohol because it teaches students in a mature way. It provides them with knowledge and understanding instead of trying to tell them what to do. The fact is that there is no way to eliminate the use of alcohol thus our only prevention is to educate kids at our colleges and universities properly and maturely. Programs must be installed in every school in the United States to lead our future in the right direction. We must teach our youth that alcohol is a very habit-forming, addictive drug that has severe aftermaths. Students must understand what the risks are and what measures can be used to inform others of this problem. Clifford R. Browell, Chairman of the Department of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation at the Teachers College of Columbia University states,

How do we begin to solve this problem? There is obviously no one single person, no single cause that can be put to blame for this problem that exists at our colleges. Yet it must be realized that unfortunately, as wrong as it may be, alcohol becomes a part of many students' lives. Many American-College students go to parties where alcohol is present. But the majority of these students are underage, illegal drinkers according to our laws. The point being that trying to tell students not to drink and hoping that they will listen does not work very well. Richard P. Keeling, author of an article titled "Drinking in College: the Politics of Research and Prevention", writes

Let's first begin by understanding what alcoholism is and what it does to us. Alcoholism can be defined as an illness or a chronic disorder that comes from constant drinking. It obviously has serious physical and mental effects on a person. According to Louis Joylon West, M.D., a professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine, the attributes that define an addiction, in this case alcohol, include craving, tolerance and withdrawal phenomena (West, 28). This is a problem that exists among men and women of all ages. Alcohol addiction has no barriers to race, religion or sex; anyone can have this addiction. Is alcoholism a disease? The American Medical Association and the World Health Organization officially

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Approximate Word count = 2221
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)