Re: Alcohol Abuse and the Drinking Age

   While reading some of the blogs of other students in my Communications Technology class, I came upon this post about alcohol abuse, and lowering the drinking age. I originally posted a comment there a while back about why I don’t think it’s a good idea to lower this limit, but I am going to develop a bit more on this topic: It is a very interesting one.

     First off, how does alcohol affect you? When you consume an alcoholic beverage, the alcohol immediately enters the bloodstream, and lingers for about two hours. The alcohol-heavy blood enters the brain, and washes it in alcohol. The brain functions by way of thousands of nerve cells, which are connected together via synapses.

    These synapses function in the following way: First, one nerve receives a signal. As the signal passes to the other end of the nerve, it triggers a series of chemical reactions that produce substances called neurotransmitters, which are released at the other synapse when the electric signal reaches the end. These chemicals spread out across the small space of the synapse, thus passing the electric signal on to the next nerve, and so on. If alcohol has flooded the brain, the synapses will “fire” more quickly; the alcohol speeds up the reactions in the nerves.

Information is stored in the brain in the strength of the synapses. When you learn something, the input nerve from your eyes, ears, nose, etc.. passes its signal to several other nerves. When you force the brain to make an association, or respond to a stimulus with a certain response, you have to practice a response. Every time you practice the response, the strength of the synapse between the input nerve and the nerve leading to the desired action is increased, such that when an input is received, the nerve that fires is the one with the strongest synapse connection to the input nerve.

Since alcohol strengthens all synapses, but not necessarily by the same amount for each synapse, normal stimuli can evoke strange and incorrect responses, your brain feels groggy as it tries to fix the damage, and the brain can make weird and incorrect connections between topics or information due to the sudden strengthening of synapses that now contain “wrong” information links.

The brain has to cope with the devastation wreaked upon it by alcohol for a few hours until it exits your system, but damages can be permanent. The over-strengthened neurons fire much faster and much more intensely, and can burn out and die much more easily, resulting in a lot of dead brain cells when the alcohol wears off.

In conclusion, although lowering the drinking age on the condition that drinking is limited to small amounts is an interesting idea, the brain of a person under 21 is still developing, and the damages caused by alcohol could be irreversible.

                                                                          Photo Credits: Pezibear via Pixabay, PD; Geralt via Pixabay, PD