At first she was afraid to mention it, but later, when she finally did, she found that her date was actually relieved. He was not eager to drink, but he was afraid it was expected of him. Actually he had much more respect for her, as a girl of principles, than when he assumed she blindly followed the crowd.

Drinking and Driving

Drinking and driving are a bad combination. The papers often report accidents caused by people who felt they were sober enough to drive. Tests show that alcohol slows down your reaction time to an alarming extent. Even if you are feeling perfectly all right, you’re an unsafe driver if you have been drinking. Many people realize this and leave their cars at home when they think they will be served liquor. If your escort has been drinking through an evening, and you have not, it’s for your own safety to ask for the keys so that you can do the driving. If you don’t know how to drive, you’ll probably want to make some other arrangements for getting home.

Drinking and Sex

As people drink they begin to lose their higher controls. The more they drink, the more uninhibited they become. Girls have gotten into serious trouble under the influence of alcohol. If a boy has had something to drink, it’s harder to put off his sexual advances. He does things when he has been drinking that he would never consider doing when sober. Then both he and the girl must face their regrets the next morning—and all too often through the years ahead. Teenagers generally find that drinking and sex are a dangerous combination.

THE QUESTION OF SMOKING

Smoking is accepted among some people as a natural thing to do. Others find that it’s an annoying habit. Continuing research linking excessive smoking with lung cancer has caused many people to decide that smoking is just not worth the risk involved. Whether or not you smoke depends upon your background and personal feelings.

Why People Smoke

Smoking usually starts as a form of rebellion against authority. Teen-agers in the process of breaking the ties that bind them to their parents often use smoking as a form of rejection of their childhood. They feel that smoking makes them more “grown-up” in the eyes of their peers. Smoking may also be a manifestation of oral craving, arising out of insufficient sucking as a child. This oral craving is relieved by smoking or by eating or chewing gum.

Smoking Is Habit Forming

One of the main problems of smoking is that it’s habit forming. If you have successfully broken away from the strong ties you had with your family, you may no longer need smoking to assure yourself that you’re grown-up. By this time, however, smoking has become such a habit that it’s difficult to stop. It is true that many people attempt to stop, and some people actually do make the break, but, generally, people have great difficulty in stopping completely. One person wisely remarked that giving up cigarettes was easy—he had done it hundreds of times! Smokers usually admit that smoking is an expensive and messy habit. But some individuals feel that if: provides enough relaxation to be worth the disadvantages. Others feel that it’s not worth the trouble, and if they never start, they will never have to worry about stopping.