R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center Nurse Debbie Yohn provided insight into the many devastating aspects of increasingly common behavior. Yohn’s presentation, devoid of facts, allowed graphic images to enlighten the audience with her message: drunk driving is selfish and irresponsible conduct that kills.

Yohn’s personal account of her experiences in the Emergency Room of Cowley, combined with vivid pictures and videos, created an air of tense shock among those in the audience that was carefully broken by Yohn’s own guest speaker, simply introduced as "Judy."

Judy, who was involved in a drunk driving incident at the age of 25 that rendered her brain damaged, shared her experiences on living life with learning difficulties, injured vocal chords and lack of full peripheral vision.

Her lesson, delivered with highly poignant dark humor, honesty and a cynical edge, was also simple: wear a seat belt; avoid drugs; don’t drink and drive; don’t drink period.

The GHS audience seemed sufficiently receptive, though the sound of laughter filled the auditorium at various times, particularly after significantly realistic car crash scenes depicted by the several videos shown.

Though it was evident that some students were not as deeply affected by the presentation, the majority of assembly participants seemed to be impacted on some level as they returned to class."It made me realize that drinking and driving is not worth it," senior Dalia Pineda says.

"I am paranoid about my actions now," senior Christian Lemus says. "I’ll probably think more about the consequences from now on."

Yohn’s presentation barely touched the surface of a severe issue. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an estimated 12,998 people died in alcohol related crashes in 2007.

16- to 20-year-olds made up about 10 percent of all incidents, with 1,205 fatalities. The Center for Disease Control states that at all levels of blood alcohol concentration, young people foster a greater risk of being involved in a crash than older people, and the majority, about 80 percent, tend to be male.

CDC also notes that other drugs, such as marijuana and cocaine, often act as contributing factors in addition to the abuse of alcohol. These substances were all things the center wants teens to avoid.

Contrasting its dark statistics, the NHTSA also attests that drunk driving has been steadily decreasing for years, though not significantly.

The efforts of organizations such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and aggressive legal action by the government at all three levels have continuously kept the statistics from soaring. Additionally, individual schools, such as GHS, have launched campaigns to inform their students about the dangers and grave consequences of drunk driving

Ultimately, students will have to make a decision that often rests between personal responsibility and peer pressure. Yohn recognizes the difficulty of this quandary, having been a victim of a drunk driving incident herself. She went through much hardship and struggle through the last 10 years of her life. She explained the consequences of her actions and how it can severly affect people for the rest of their lives. At age 35, she has to walk with a cane as if she were 75. Her motivation was to help GHS understand the dark side of drunk driving, the side that teens think they will never see.

Yohn concluded by saying, "I survived a car crash when I was 17 years old. My best friend didn’t. I spent a summer at a hospital and a year learning how to walk. I chose to get in a car with her and she died (when she was) 19. I try to make a difference now. Hopefully, we saved a couple (of) lives today."