Speaker wearing Drunk Goggles
Recently, Upper Darby High School in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, hosted a drinking and driving assembly after school in their gymnasium. Fliers were posted all around school leading up to the event and over 300 teenage students voluntarily attended. Groups like MADD and SADD are known for having events like this to keep students from making unwise decisions.
The event began with a traffic and accident attorney talking about the new Pennsylvania law that states that people cannot text on their phones while driving.
After the attorney, students listened to a drug and alcohol prevention speaker, Fabian Ramirez, who took the teens on a journey into the effects that drugs and alcohol have on the body. “Teens get drunk twice as fast as adults”, Ramirez said after stating that the average teenage brain takes 20 years to fully develop and any psychoactive drug including alcohol can curtail the developmental process. Ramirez went on to say that, “the brain working like computer software does, but alcohol acts like a virus in which is switches the wire in your brain causes the normal senses in your body to lose normal function abilities”.
Ramirez took time to educate teens about alcohol going as far as demonstrating what happens when one binge drinks and gets alcohol poisoning. Students were grossed out when he talked about how drunks are not able to control their vomit and can pass out before they can ask for help. Since alcohol takes a while to enter the blood stream, teens that drink do not feel the after effects that beer and hard liquor have on the body until after they arrived home. This is why there are numerous cases of teens who have been found dead in their rooms after a long night of drinking. Still students hate the fact that they have to wait until the age of 21 to legally drink.
Upper Darby High School did a fantastic job of creating a drinking course in the gym. Students were able to wear drunk goggles during the event and get in a wheelchair and try to navigate through orange rubber cones. The majority were unsuccessful hitting cones along the way which could have been pedestrians in real life. After the drunk goggles were taken off, students were still seeing spots and not able to fully gain vision right away. Many were heard commenting on how hard it was to focus. That was the focus of the day, to educate teens on alcohol abuse so they think twice before drinking when they are not supposed to.
