Pediatricians in the Netherlands are seeing a dramatic increase in cases of alcohol-intoxication in teenagers. Past night I had to admit a 14 year old girl to the hospital who had drank half a bottle of Vodka (375 cc). She was quite fuddled and incoherent, but when I told her that I was going to take her to the children's ward she became angry and told me loudly and with a thick tongue that she was almost 15 and definitely NOT a child.
Well, I must admit she didn't look like a child, and I can imagine that the shopkeeper who sold her the Vodka might have thought she was adult. I took my time to talk with the parents, and the father confessed that he had allowed her to drink a cocktail on her 14th birthday.
Experts say that is where it often goes wrong. Children learn to drink alcoholic beverages at home, and then when there is no adult supervision, they drink to much.
The teenager brain is very vulnerable and gets damaged easily by alcohol intoxication. Since the brain continues to grow and develop until the early twenties, progenitor nerve-cells are at risk, which might explain why teenage alcohol abuse leads to serious problems in adult-hood as shown in recent studies.
Dutch hospitals have setup a network of outpatient clinics where teenage alcohol abuse is tackled. However I fear there is one similarity between alcohol abuse in teenagers and severe obesity, both are very serious problems, but health care professionals stand more or less powerless.
