RJA #9b: Argument

Research Question: Does addiction to alcoholic substances have different effects on people of different ages?


Reason 1: Everyone knows to not drive while intoxicated, but regardless of that fact, it happens everyday. Alcohol is a psycoactive substance (alters mood and brain functions) which greatly inhibits self control of an individual. No amount of responsibility will help a person if they already lost their self control young or old.

Reason 2: Having an alcoholic in the family is detrimental to each individual in that family regardless of who is the alcoholic. A parent with alcoholism in the family may start evading their work. Then that parent may proceed onto stealing money or striking family members (result of irritation deprived of alcohol) demanding money. Similarily enough, a child with alcoholism can initiate violence in the house and cease going to school.

Reason 3: The short term drinking effects are the same in both young and old, confusion, blackout, coma, and eventually death. It seems at first that only adults can suffer the long term effects of alcoholism (cirrohsis, death of brain tissue, high blood pressure) due to the fact that these effects take approximately 10 years to manifest in an individual. However, considering that the individual became an alcoholic prior to becoming an adult, they will most likely continue their pattern and encounter these long term effects anyways, which doesn't change the constant which are the people.

Counter 1: "The "adults are more responsible than teenagers" idea - Alcohol inhibits self restraint, such as NOT DRINKING AND DRIVING, but it still happens because responsibility can not change someone who has lost their basic self control. Perhaps a young person became an alcoholic at the age of 15 and was able to avoid a morbid fate for a decade, that person's level of responsibility is still highly questionable despite the fact that they grown up.

Counter 2: "Youth drinking alcohol turns them into bad people when they turn into adults" idea - This is a confusion between causation and correlation common among the population. Perhaps it is bad young people that like to drink alcohol and grow up to be bad adults.

Counter 3: "It is highly more dangerous for a teenager to be drunk than an adult" - An adult has easier access to alcohol over a teenager, adults can be in contact with the substance for a whole year if they willed it compared to a teenager who will have to play through more steps to obtain it. If both the adult and the teenager in the question were both alcoholics, the adult will be much more of a hazard due to the fact the uptime of intoxication is higher than that of the teenager.