Everyone drinks alcohol. It's a safe and harmless way to have fun on a Saturday night, who would challenge that?

For many teenagers, getting into the alcohol is a part of every normal Saturday afternoon or night. For my friends it is anyway. We like it because it makes us feel like someone else, perhaps someone more confident and cheerful. But alcohol can cause some extremely embarrassing moments, sometimes some very regretted decisions, and sometimes violence.

When I was in year eleven at high school, a normal Saturday afternoon was spent in the annex of a caravan in my friend Laura's backyard. It was a bit of a hang out spot for our group of friends, as well as her brothers' friends. This is where it was always happening - the watching satellite television, the drinking alcohol, the smoking weed, the first sexual experiences... we liked to think we were all grown up, and that we were having fun. But I think all of us were hiding something.

On this particular afternoon, some of the guys had started drinking by 2.00pm. I expect they were a little stoned too. Nothing unusual. A large group of us wandered over to David's house nearby to give Janine and Will some privacy in the van, and the drinking continued while we played Nintendo and lazed around on the floor. David got out his slug gun and started shooting at cans in the living room and teasing the dog with the barrel. It was kinda given that the dog wasn't going to last long. After a while some of the girls started yelling at David not to shoot at the dog, but he was much bigger than us and tended to get physically violent when he'd been drinking, so we knew to shut up before things got out of hand.

Laura obviously had a lot of things on her mind, and once the yelling had begun she disappeared into the bathroom looking for a panadol and didn't come out. Meanwhile the two that had been in the van, came over and Janine started on David about the dog too. Janine was the type of person who got loud when she had been drinking and kind of persistently irritating. Obviously David and Janine were bad together - she started to tease him yelling 'come on David, hit me, give it to me', while the rest of us ignored them, still watching the TV. Before long he'd picked her up and thrown her across the room. Her head hit a bottle of port on the mantle piece and she was unconscious before she landed on the slate in front of the fireplace. That woke everyone up, but while by that time everyone was up and yelling at each other, this was still not overly unusual for a Saturday.

At hearing the noise, Laura swallowed every panadol in the packet, as well as anything else she could find in the bathroom, and staggered into the living room to see what was going on. As she walked in, David suddenly went wild in seeing that Janine hadn't come to yet, flinging his arms around and throwing furniture. It was only seconds before he started punching walls and he only stopped once he'd punched both of his arms through the glass sliding door. At seeing the blood he too collapsed onto the floor, and it took six of us to carry him into the bedroom. Janine woke to find some of the guys on the couch shaking and tearful, which set her off again yelling and screaming.

Once in the bedroom, David woke and wouldn't let anyone near him. Anyone who came too close was hit with a chair or a lamp or whatever was closest, and he ordered everyone out of his room so that he could die in peace. Those of us who had only recently learnt first aid at school tried to reassure him that he was okay and convince him that we needed to bandage him and get some help, but he could see the bones and muscle in his arms protruding and wasn't going to let anyone near. Not very conveniently, David didn't have a telephone at his house.

I don't think anyone was really with it by then. I guess most of us were in shock. Some people sat around outside, while others paced up and down the hallway. Of about 15 people, only two were actually trying to do something useful. I tried to coax David into my car while being kicked at and beaten no one seemed to be able to get close enough to help him. His younger brother soon arrived, with his mobile phone, but he wouldn't call an ambulance because he knew he didn't have ambulance cover and couldn't afford the $500 fee. More importantly, he didn't want cops in the house because he'd just received a new esky full of marijuana. A couple of my friends tried to wrestle him to the ground to get his phone, but gave up instead deciding to run down the road to get Laura's parents who might not have left the house yet. It was a while before they arrived, also yelling, and helped to drag David into their car and take him to casualty. Laura's parents were stoned too, and very angry - as they often tended to be.

David was soon taken by flying doctors to the city because his cuts were too severe for country doctors. When he came back a week later he had nearly 60 stitches in his arms, for which he, of course, blamed us. The doctor was extremely angry that it had taken us nearly an hour to get him in to casualty and threatened to call the police. We soon learned that we would all have been up for manslaughter should he have died.

When the plane had taken off, Laura's Dad went off, yelling at us and dragging us back to David's house to vacuum up the glass and scrub the bloodstained carpet well into the night. He even threatened us, warning us not to tell our parents about what had happened tonight, which seemed a little unusual.

When we were done, we all went back to Laura's van where the drinking began again. Some of us were arguing with both Janine and Laura that they too needed to go in to casualty because Janine obviously had a concussion and Laura still looked too woozy. But by then everyone was getting much too drunk to put up much of a fight. Soon everyone had calmed down and we were comforting each other after the shock of such a long night. But Laura's parents were not happy when they heard laughter coming out of the van.

Laura's Dad burst into the van, and sternly told everyone to go home. That seemed fair enough to most of us and everyone took off in various directions. But anyone who was very close to Laura knew that his words meant more. As Laura, Will, Ed, and Janine lived in the van, they had nowhere to go, and Laura's Dad grabbed Will and Ed by the hair, dragged them outside to throw them into a corrugated iron fence, and began beating them. Laura's Mum grabbed Janine and started throwing bricks at her as she ran down the road. Laura, Kay and I ran in the opposite direction to a house down the road where a policeman lived. We knocked for a long time, but no one answered, so we ran further across town to my house where we called the police. They arrived over 45 minutes later and questioned us for another 20, by which time everyone had spread across the town, and Laura's parents were back in bed. Basically they did nothing. We wandered around town looking for houses with the lights on, until eventually we found the others and established that everyone was okay. It was long dawn before we made it back to my house.

It was the first time that all of my friends could claim to remember everything that had happened on a Saturday night, but I don't think we were all that proud. Id like to think that we all learned big lessons from that night, but we were all back in the van the next Friday after school. We were all in trouble at school for not having completed the weekend homework.

Three years later, David has some massive scars that he likes to show off, Janine still has dizzy spells and bad vision from not attending to her concussion, and Will and Laura still get beaten by their parents regularly. They all still drink themselves into oblivion every weekend and are stoned most of the time. This life is still 'normal' to all of them. It probably still will be when they are parents themselves. In fact, Kay is about to have her first child. Other friends of mine are forever scarred by the car accidents they've had when they were stoned. Three have been in put in psyc wards and two in jail. Many of my female friends will never get over their abortions.

But this life doesn't have to be normal forever. I am now living in the city and attending university. I have left this lifestyle behind me and I hope to create for myself the sort of life that my friends don't think they are worthy of. One day I hope to have my own house, a nice husband and my own children to go with my career. My parents are the garbage men, and you've just read about my lifestyle - there are no excuses for putting off your dreams.

If going out and getting drunk is your idea of a normal weekend, it could almost be excused to think that you are a 'normal' teenager. I know you can feel like an outcast if you don't drink, and somewhere teenagers get the idea that this is what they want and what makes them happy. There is nothing at all exceptional about my friends - everyone has their story to tell. But you ARE kidding yourself if you think your Saturday nights out are harmless fun. None of my friends are happy.

I dare you to question yourself as to whether your alcohol consumption has become a way to drown your sorrows and is beginning to cause more harm than good. I guarantee you, if it hasn't yet, it soon will. You can do anything you want to do - please don't let alcohol become normal for your weekends. I know you can make your life worth so much more than that, and you don't have to be trapped, believing in fake alcohol-based happiness.