North Shore CASA to change culture of underage drinking

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“This is the teenage brain,” Executive Assistant District Attorney Maureen McCormick said, pointing at a projection of side-by-side brain scan images. On the left was the brain of a sober teen, and on the right, one who drinks alcohol. The images showed, she said, that teens who drink suffer from diminished memory, which can impact their studies.

“They’re impulsive and emotional,” McCormick told parents who had assembled at the presentation in the Glenwood Landing Elementary School auditorium. “They’re thrill seeking, rebellious and illogical and if you’re living with one you don’t need me to tell you that.”

She outlined several such impulsive behaviors that she had observed as an ADA; vaping, whippets, self-strangulation, and of course, those more traditional vices, marijuana and alcohol.

Underage drinking continues to be a problem, she said. And CASA — the North Shore school district’s Coalition Against Substance Abuse who hosted the event — is taking aim at the parents who they say enable it.

“If you look back to when I grew up,” Marty Glennon, an advisor for CASA said, “you were smoking on airplanes, smoking in restaurants, smoking everywhere. Today, you can’t even smoke in a public park.”

That cultural shift, he added, could be replicated with underage drinking. “It was the result of a discussion,” he said, “and it’s a discussion that we’re going to have here tonight.”

He rattled off statistics gleaned from a recent survey of the district’s students. Relevant to the discussion was the survey’s finding that about 40 percent of the district’s seniors said that they sometimes drink at home with their parents’ permission.

CASA is asking parents to sign a pledge, in which they promise not to permit substance use on their property, and to provide active supervision when teens are gathered there. Parents who sign the pledge also encourage other parents to let them know if they observe their child engaging in destructive behaviors.

Those who sign the pledge will have their names posted in a list on the coalition’s website, to give parents a sense of who they can trust to supervise their children and to provide a means of supporting each other through the turbulent teen years and the parental challenges that accompany them.