It’s booze not drugs that’s
poisoning US teenagers today,
says alexander cockburn |
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American politicians still parrot Nancy Reagan's 'Just say no' campaign against teen drug use. Barrack Obama's in trouble for supposedly telling teens he too used bad drugs including heroin. But the needle and the joint don't hold a candle to simple booze in which the current cohort, stretching from mid-teen high schoolers through to college age kids, is marinating itself into weekly oblivion. Another lost generation is in the making.
Kids are getting loaded earlier and more often than they used to. One big concern touted in the press endlessly used to be date-rape, with the girl victim laid out by drugs. Now it's binge-drinking. High schoolers, and in particular high school girls, drink hard liquor in large quantities as fast as they can and pass out. Sometimes they get gang-banged and wake up pregnant.
This is the culture. Much of it started with |
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High school girls drink hard liquor and pass out. Sometimes they get gang-banged and wake up pregnant
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the Girls Gone Wild home videos, which were largely filmed during spring break. Now it's spring break all year round. For fun at frat or sorority parties, the pledges – that is, those who have been accepted for membership - are made to drink until they throw up and pass out. Then they are stripped by the sober contingent and have swastikas and racist epithets written on their
bodies in permanent magic marker, have their penises inserted in the mouths of other inebriates, broomhandles inserted in their backsides and the whole affair is filmed and posted on Facebook or My Space.
If parents really want to know what their kids are up to they should read the Facebook entries - but it's probably better not to know. A friend of mine with a frat boy son returned shaken from one weekend visit to the frat house having witnessed a lad vomiting on the sleeping fathers during 'Dads' Weekend'. This was after he had drained a bottle of Grey Goose vodka, following a day of non-stop drinking. "I don't know how he survived," my friend concluded in some 
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American football goes to the dogs
Fight terrorism - and public lewdness
