gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett) (03/28/86)
In article <220@ecrcvax.UUCP> snoopy@ecrcvax.UUCP (Sebastian Schmitz) writes: > In fact just this Monday, the "Spiegel" ( a well known German > news weekly) has published some statistics, re. juvenile > alcoholism. So lets inject some figures into this debate. > Samples were from 2300 students from Bremen and Berlin,i.e. not > Bavaria, where alcohol is more common: > > * 37 % of all students age 12 - 24 drink alcoholic beverages > regularly. [ ... and increases thru-out the teens. ] Seb offered some explanations why this might be true, like peer pressure, among others. Here is another: the weight of stress upon pubescent, adolescent children. (a brief diversion) An article in "Science News" about a year ago reported about experiments with elephants (yes, elephants) who were divided into two groups, each supplied with both water and alcohol (?wine). Their respective surroundings were identical, except that one group had a smaller living space, ie, a denser population. This group tended to go for the wine quite a bit (a few (humorous) descriptions of drunken elephants were provided). The other group didn't touch the stuff (or very little, if at all). It was also reported that while elephants do not typically find barrels of wine in the jungles, they *do* find rotted fruit, and guess what's in that? (not a very good vintage, tho' ...). This suggests some relationship between stress and the consumption of drugs. I suggest that this is related to the adolescent consumption of alcohol quite directly. We find increasing alcohol use coincidentally over the same time period of puberty, which, as you may recall, is a rather stressful period of life. This, topped with the typical adolescent preoccupation with self-image, suggests a whole bunch of stress, and like over-crowded elephants, they seek a temporary means of escape. [ note that this cross-posted to net.med and net.sci, and that followups are directed to them and not net.jobs where the topic arose. ] -- Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,seismo,hplabs}!amdahl!gam ~ Ah don't need no diamond ring ~ ~ Ah don't need no Cadillac car! ~ ~ Ah just wanna drink my Lone Star beer ~ ~ Down in the Lightnin' bar! ~