I don’t use drugs nor alcohol, but I just turned 18 and I noticed that a lot of people younger than me (high school age so 14-17 even) use alcohol and sometimes drugs from siblings, older friends, etc.
Did you do that when you were younger than me? I don’t plan on doing so anyway.
My younger wine is at college and doesn’t drink (good for him). Since the drinking age here is 21, most college kids can’t legally drink. Of course they do anyway, and I can’t be too judgemental since I did at that age as well.
However my son abandoned his initial group of friends because that’s all they wanted to do, socially. There’s a game, and students get free tickets: nope, I’d be late to the frat parties. There’s this cool trail: nope, the parties are then. Let’s go to this movie: I’ll be drinking then.
I realize I’m only hearing half the story, but it really seems like not just excessive drinking but drinking as a problem, interfering with normal life.
I didn’t try alcohol until I was 25, but I’m definitely an outlier.
No. I didn’t drink alcohol until 21, and didn’t try weed until 25.
User name leads me to believe you’re better off doing it beforehand if waiting til a legal age makes you crack happy.
My friend and I bought weed once when we were 17, but we never got the chance to smoke it before a third friend ratted us out. I started drinking alcohol and smoking weed a year later when I got to college.
There’s an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in my area called “Never Had A Legal Drink.” It was created by and for people who decided that they were alcoholics and had to stop drinking before they turned 21.
Plenty of people get into drugs/alcohol at an early age.
my friends dad would feed us beer in the pub at 13 years old. We were having lock ins in local rural pubs in deserted rural areas by 16. At 18 (legal drinking age here) I could party all night.
I didn’t, many many many people have though
I was a nervous kid. I didn’t try alcohol until 20 and weed till I was 31. They can be fun but remember your brain is still developing. Don’t really use them until that has stopped. They have profoundly negative effects on your developing brain.
And alcohol is literally just poison. Id avoid that completely if you don’t have a strong desire to drink. I say that as a neurodivergent that self medicates with alcohol. It’s not good stuff.
I’ve had a couple of parent-sanctioned sips of beer once every few years as a teenager, but never got drunk nor smoked any weed for the first time until age 20.
Fun fact from a psych nurse: you can usually estimate how many years a person has spent abusing substances by how many years behind they seem in their emotional development. A 30y/o who still acts 20ish has probably spent ~10 years using. It’s not necessarily contiguous, they might have started at fifteen, used for 3, got sober for two, used for 7 more then been sober for the last 3, but they’ve probably spent about ten years using in total. Abusing substances lets people avoid the psychological crises they would normally need to confront to grow as a person. When they stop using they don’t get to skip ahead, they have to pick up maturing from where they left off. It can also happen with non-substance behavioral addictions (like gambling) but it has to be real bad.
I went to university when I was two weeks away from my 16th birthday. I started smoking weed that summer, and tried alcohol when I was 17.
Not regularly or often, but yes. It’s actually legal from the age of 14 here (under parental supervision and only lower-alcohol stuff like beer). So I’d have a bit here or there for special occasions like New Year’s Eve. From the age of 16 you’re allowed to drink unsupervised. At that point some of my classmates already got drunk regularly. I never liked alcohol (or rather its effects) that much though and to this day I’ve never been drunk. These days I might drink something like a glass of wine every few weeks or so.
i started drinking at 14/15.
My psrents gave me a sip as a teen and I hated it. I tried it again at 21 and hated it then too. It was only a few years after that I tried something I liked.
About the same here. Friends were drinking soft alcohol constantly at parties. I stuck to one bottle and took all night for it, because I had to force it. Nowadays I gave up on alcohol completely. So I won’t hope for something I like and grab the soft drink straight away.
I think I had a small amount of alcohol at weddings and new years celebrations when I was a teenager.
My parents don’t have the healthiest relationship with alcohol. it’s not the worst, but it never seemed cool or fun. It was just dad having a few cheap beers while watching the game. They never told me not to drink, either. No “forbidden fruit” allure.
