College Drinking:
College Freshman Gone Wild on Booze
Giving Drinking the Old College Try: Why Underage Drinkers Binge in America
by Josh Day
If you've been to college, chances are you remember the first time you saw someone -- or a number of people -- drunk. I really believe drinking and college are unlike drinking during any other stage of life.
You were young, fresh away from home and more free than you'd ever been in your life, surrounded by other kids in the same boat, and if your first semester was anything like mine, it was a transitional time of confusion and figuring out just how this strange new environment of university life works.
And if you're my age, you grew up in the late eighties and nineties and were likely spoon-fed enough conflicting crap on the subject that a mere hourly dose of brew-soaked college reality was enough to rattle your senses and make you question everything you'd been taught.
Before I hit the University of North Carolina at Asheville in the fall of 2000, I'd attended three different schools. All of them were responsible for divvying out misinformation -- and often all-out lies -- concerning alcohol and the terrible and dangerous crime of underage drinking. Sometimes I think I'd like to contact each one of the various educators, administrators, and "special guest" speakers (from several cultural and religious institutions) and simply ask them why.
- Why nothing but scare tactics and propaganda?
- Why did you lay it on so thick?
- Why couldn't you have been truthful with us?
Honestly, looking back at some of the all-school assemblies we sat through makes me sick. One headmaster back in New Orleans used the death of a high school senior in a drunk driving accident as a means to terrify elementary grade children; he actually said some of us could die from swallowing one drop of alcohol, citing some vague medical condition that's extremely rare and not well understood. While this may sound ridiculous and laughable, this drivel was being ladled to children, some of who had known the deceased.
Instead of focusing on the dangers of drunk driving or being in the same car with a drunk at the wheel, we were told we may painfully die if we drank even one drop of alcohol. Of course, at the Episcopal school I later attended in Florida, we were also taught AIDS can be spread by kissing or from someone's sweat in a basketball game, so who's counting, right?
Unfortunately, my experience with these kinds of "lectures" was not unique, and I believe it sheds light on why so many college freshman binge drink.
My first night in college I was in a room with other freshman who were drinking. Some were drunk, some were loud and rambunctious, some weren't drinking at all. The memory is almost surreal now, as I recall sitting on someone's dorm room couch and waiting for the cops to break down the door any minute, or a kid to start choking and going into death throes.
I was eighteen years old.
As the night progressed I fought my irrational instincts which were telling me to flee back to my own dorm room. And slowly, I began to realize something: drinking really wasn't such a big deal. It was not this catastrophic, life-wrecking proximity bomb all the schools and their guest psychiatrist speakers had intimated it was.
My third or fourth night with this group of freshmen who lived on my hall I drank a can of Busch beer. I had to force it down, as it tasted like a piss-drenched loaf of bread (as did the imports I tried as well), but I wasn't feeling my throat close up. I wasn't asphyxiating, as that long-ago headmaster had warned would happen to a "meaningful percentage of the population."
I realized most of what I had been told was lies.
I remember the first time I saw someone puke from overdrinking. Again, all the old fears came rushing back. If you ever see someone vomiting from alcohol, you must call 911 immediately, I had been told so many times by so many different "experts" and "adults."
Well, over my four-year university tenure, I've seen a lot of people puke, a lot of people drunk as snot, yet I've never seen or heard of anyone who directly died from alcohol poisoning.
As I had a somewhat unique experience, allow me to shed even more light on the subject.
I joined a fraternity my freshman semester and am proud to say we were the only fraternity to follow the rules and throw safe campus-wide parties. A third party venue with an alcohol license, buses to pick the revelers up at campus and bring them home, outside security (we hired off-duty cops), professional ID checking services, five million dollars of liability insurance, and the entire fraternity as sober party monitors.
To give you an idea of how seriously we took these parties, if a brother showed up to the event with even the hint of booze on his breath, he was sent home and immediately put on suspension.
I served as executive officer for the chapter, and during my term I oversaw the many safety and liability precautions we had in place from our national office. I recall a meeting with our district overseer as we went through various documents and insurance forms.
Along with our Risk Reduction chair (a brother whose sole job is to comply to safety regulations and minimize risks to our guests as well as ourselves vis a vie lawsuits), we were going through a list of alcohol-related deaths involving other chapters and fraternites across the country.
Below are a few of the deaths I remember:
- A female fell eight stories from her open dorm window into tree, intoxicated
- Female fell down a set of stairs, intoxicated
- Female died from drug overdose, intoxicated
- Male fell from moving vehicle, intoxicated
- Male (fraternity member) fell from a twelve foot rock wall, intoxicated
- Male froze to death in icy creek, intoxicated
- Male died from choking on own vomit after friends abandoned him, intoxicated
- Female died from choking on own vomit after friends abandoned her, intoxicated
Not one cause of death was due directly to alcohol (alcohol poisoning), yet every single one could have been prevented through proper education based on reality and pragmatism, with an emphasis on moderation as opposed to totalitarian teetotaling.
A 1996-1998 study on alcohol poisoning states:
Alcohol poisoning deaths tended to be most prevalent among people ages 35 to 54; only 2 percent of alcohol poisoning decedents were younger than age 21. Among deaths with a contributing cause of alcohol poisoning, almost 90 percent had an underlying cause related to some type of poisoning from other drugs. (study)
I am proud to say under my watch as executive officer, as well as throughout our entire chapter's history at UNCA, not one person was ever injured at one of our campus sponsored parties.
That's not to say I haven't seen my fair share of the gross, the bad, and the ugly.
During one memorably stressful party, the entire basketball team got into a fight -- luckily, we were able to break it up before anyone was hurt. We had to clean vomit off the dance floor almost around the clock once midnight hit. Both male and female lavatories were abattoirs of spilled beer and liquor, vomit, and urine.
The shuttles (rented buses that took the guests to and from the party) were always breeding grounds for skirmishes and fights and had to have a special combination of brothers on board: a smaller, nonthreatening brother who kept cool under hot circumstances and a big guy to act as muscle in the event things got out of control. Thankfully, nothing got too out of hand, though there were times I was very happy to have my 6' 5", 300-pound friend on the bus with me.
During my college years, I was an advocate of stopping these parties altogether as none of us ever had fun, we always lost a thousand dollars or more on each one, and the campus never seemed to appreciate what we offered or went through to let them have a good time away from what's not so unlovingly known as a cow college.
Largely I blame the excessive drinking and unrestrained behavior we witnessed at these parties on American culture and the taboo surrounding drinking. This taboo is put in place by educators and the people they fly in to scare kids into "not drinking," then it's only exacerbated by the ridiculous and over-the-top parties depicted in movies and popular culture.
I was a collegiate member of the largest fraternity during my tenure at UNCA, so I saw my fair share of "life" at our small liberal arts college. Granted, I may be square or just hung out with square people, but I never once witnessed the kind of insane behavior that's so commonly and irresponsibly shown in teenage movies. Even during our wild campus parties, it was much more toned down than what I routinely see in movies and television.
These movies, combined with the ridiculous "DON'T YOU DARE" policy pushed by the schools, are a deadly recipe for binge drinking and probably the worst enemy to a word every college freshman should know and live: moderation.
Let's talk about moderation for a moment, and how we can impart this critical process of thinking onto young people.
What if all of us in fourth grade learned about beer? How it's brewed, how long it's been around, its physiological effects on the human body, and dare I say, how it tastes. We could have made our own batch while learning about Prohibition, had our own Speakeasy in the classroom as we drank from little ketchup cups the brew we made ourselves.
Demystifying something deprives it of power. Forbidding the same thing, putting sanctions and taboos against it, empowers it.
Moderation is not a difficult thing to learn. And it's not a tough thing to teach. Being honest with your children, students, and other young people about drinking -- it can be a lot of fun, it can be dangerous, it can get you in trouble, it is a substance that must be respected -- will give them the tools they need to help better understand the crazy college world into which they are entering.
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