I recently read a data where it was said that 48% of minors in Spain consume alcohol. This data is worrying, since a large part of these minors do so with the consent of their families. In my opinion, this is largely due to our culture, where it is practically necessary to consume alcohol to have fun. To this is added the normalization within families, where alcohol is lived daily and practically inherited from children.
Currently there are many initiatives that try to alleviate this advance of the age where alcohol is started, on many occasions with great success. But, don't you think that to a large extent it doesn't matter that this be solved? There are many economic interests behind, as with many addictions, and this can cause that not all the necessary resources are put in to solve this problem. What is your opinion?
Hi David,
unfortunately this is the same problem in Germany. But as you say, it seems to be a part of the culture. As long as adults won't change their attitudes towards alcohol, the minors also won't. Minors want to behave like adults, but usually they don't assess before if this is really reasonable/desireable. I had a severe juvinile alcohol addiction myself starting at the age of 16. It become worse when i switched over from beer to hard stuff (Vodka) end ended up in an clinic with an addiction treatment at the age of 20.
Meanwhile I support people to overcome their alcohol addiction not by abstinence but by reprogramming the addictive behaviour. This works best by switching over to lower concentrated forms of alcohol containing < 2-3% alc. This is done simply by thinning the drinks with water. It is accepted much more than abstinence and helps to relearn self-regulation. I initiated a pilot survey at the Humboldt University Berlin with a subject group of 15 alcohol addictive persons , please find it here: https://www.researchgate.net/project/Alcohol-Addiction-Research
(Unfortunately the publication is in german language, but there is also an article in english describing the idea behind it)
As a consequence I am convinced, that we should focus on to motivate minors to stay at least with less concentrated froms of alcoholic drinks (
That's an interesting question. I am not sure of how many of these 48% would go on to develop some problems/dependence due to alcohol. However, as per my reading, it is not just dependence/addiction that is problematic for minors/underage people who drink. The majority of them use alcohol in a non-dependent manner. But there are issues of heavy episodic drinking, a pattern of drinking quite common in this age. This pattern leads to many problems including road traffic accidents, unsafe sexual behaviors, and so on. There is also a higher risk (around 4 times) of developing subsequent dependence among those who start early.
I think the same as you in a way, since on the one hand if there is real concern to solve or at least alleviate this problem, but on the other hand, if we talk about large (and not so large companies) they don’t agree that the alcohol consumption decreases, either in minors or in adults, because the more consumption, more sales and the more sales, the more money they will earn and today it seems that money is one of the prevailing objectives, sometimes putting it before health of people.
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