<p>I almost died from anaphylaxis when I was 19 because the people who were there were afraid to call an ambulance because they had been drinking, smoking pot and doing cocaine. I had been injured and was put on a medication that I was allergic to. I came home from work, took my medication and was watching tv when I became violently ill. My roommates and some friends had been hanging out all day partying and when I got sick, they were afraid to call for help because they would get in trouble. I was very lucky that a friend stopped by, found me nearly unconscious and took me to the hospital. I have worn a medical alert since that day, 33 years ago. </p>
<p>There needs to be some sort of free pass so that kids can get help for someone when they need it, without fear of sanctions. In a perfect world, no young adult would put the fear of getting in trouble ahead of
the safety and well being of another human being, but it happens. A lot
more often then you might think. I have told both of my children that their safety and that of their friends is more important than any trouble they might get into. They know that I will come get them whenever, wherever, for whatever reason. They also know that if anybody is ever in trouble, they are to call for help immediately, without fear of punishment.</p>
<p>^I’m a student, but on that note, I’m surprised that there has been no mention of amnesty policies here? </p>
<p>I know a lot of colleges, including mine, have one. Basically, you can call the police if someone is drunk and in trouble, and they will come and you will not get in trouble at all. My friends and I called once for someone this year (though we ourselves had not been drinking), and the amnesty policy worked exactly as it was supposed to, and the person who had drank to much was safely taken to the hospital. Obviously that doesn’t really get to the core issue, but I know we had no fear that the police would make assumptions that we had been drinking, which wasn’t true.</p>
<p>Kudos to your school and to you for making that call, you just might have saved a life. I wish more schools had an amnesty policy. It would be an interesting research topic, the impact these amnesty policies.</p>
<p>My D attends the school where this student died and has, on several occasions, called 911 for ER transport for incapacitated fellow students. She has never been called before a disciplinary committee for doing so. Although she was sober at the times of the calls, she was also never checked for sobriety. So, she thinks the amnesty program is in place but really doesn’t know.
S on the other hand, goes to school in Canada and has never had to call 911 for a situation like this. He is certainly parties with the best of them but scratches his head at situations that my D describes.</p>
<p>I heard about that Cornelll incident from a friend whose child attends Cornell. The kids in the fraternity are devastated but I bet very few of them stop drinking.</p>
<p>My daughter is an RA and earlier this semester, she received a call telling her to look out her window. On the ground was a kid lying in the snow - alone and unconscious. She called campus police and ran downstairs with a blanket. The boy was not a resident of her dorm, but she apparently has a reputation as an RA who will help out. She has no idea who called her but she is convinced that if they lived in her dorm, they were afraid to swipe their ID to get in because they’d get caught.</p>
<p>My D has turned kids in for underage drinking in her dorm - she warns them once and then turns them in. A couple of kids have actually thanked her for potentially saving their life or that of a friend. </p>
<p>It is so sad that these kids are wasting their lives and dying for a couple of drinks.</p>
<p>My first thought when reading this article was that it was some kind of hazing ritual, and according to one comment below the article there is a rumor going around Cornell that that is what happened. I’ll reproduce the comment from a recent Cornell and frat alumnus:
<p>Maybe schools should make classes harder now that admissions are more competitive. Students would have less time to goof around that way. I sure didn’t have time or money to drink myself into a stupor. And no, I’m not jealous ;)</p>
<p>"Sorry but I just don’t buy the glib “well, if the drinking age were lowered, college kids would drink more responsibly”, and the ever-popular “in Europe the kids drink more responsibly because the drinking age is lower”.</p>
<p>Well, they don’t. Every single northern European country has a higher youth binge drinking rate than the U.S., most very much higher. (Portugal and Hungary are lower.) And each has higher incidence of serious alcohol problems/alcoholism, cirrhosis, liver cancer, etc., than the U.S. among adults.</p>
<p>There may be something to the thesis that students are bored, or simply just not working hard enough. A study by Office of Campus Life at Duke, for example, (and reported by a Duke senior professor) found that the average Duke student, apart from classes, studied only 11 hour per week:</p>
<p>I attended Cornell when the drinking age was 18. Some of my best friends from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll era are now daily attendees at AA meetings. A thousand years later, the drinking age is 21 and the situation is the same. David Skorton, the president of Cornell is not in favor of lowering the drinking age, although many college presidents are. Cynically, I believe that they want the drinking age lowered so they don’t have to grapple with the problem. David Skorton has stated, that as a physician, he cannot recommend lowering the drinking age. I give him credit for taking this stance. I’m sure he is heartbroken, as we all are, about this completely unnecessary death. </p>
<p>My question is, why can’t America’s greatest universities (define them however you want) find a way to educate students about drinking responsibly?</p>
<p>That’s a great question. I mean, here’s a school filled with professional educators at the tops of their fields. Strong, robust psychology departments, with both behavioral and cognitive psychologists. At many schools, graduate departments of public health. Or is all the work simply “academic”?</p>
<p>By the way, some schools do very much better than others. They are NOT all the same, and there is a long list of evidence-based practices that have had significant impacts on college drinking rates. (We have just suffered the death of Dr. Alan Marlatt at the University of Washington, who invited BASICS, a college-based intervention shown to be effective. He also pioneered efforts in helping binge drinkers reduce their drinking, without a goal being alcohol abstinence. But many, many school simply don’t want to put in the effort.)</p>
<p>This binge drinking of hard liquor is so tragic. I wish there were a way to keep hard liquor out of the hands of these college students. They are all so convinced of their own immortality at that age, it is impossible to get them to understand that it is one of THE most poisonous drugs man ingests, just because it is legal. There aren’t many drugs more dangerous than alcohol, or more damaging to the body.</p>
<p>I feel horrible for the parents. Just this time last year, they were probably so happy.</p>
<p>Yup, that is pretty much how it is. Researchers are hired to do specific areas of research; not just ‘academic’ but they develop and test in particular domains of expertise (ones that are generalizable beyond their school). Though certainly some researchers, somewhere, are trying to tackle the problem of college drinking and surely a college can hire a consultant who could work on designing such a program if a solution existed. </p>
<p>So just like professors in the architecture school are not designing the buildings of the university, professors in the business school are not working in the head administration office, and researchers in dietetics are not designing the cafeteria menu, those in psychology are not necessarily even working in this particular area to solve the problem, and they wouldn’t be doing it just for their particular university anyways. </p>
<p>Though I strongly suspect there is no demonstrated program that has been shown to stamp out this problem. Just as alcohol, addiction and impaired driving have remained a larger social problem beyond college students. Indeed, we have TONS of social issues that remain unresolved by research.</p>
<p>mimi, thanks for supplying links to studies which debunk the beloved myth that somehow the European young people don’t have serious problems with binge drinking. </p>
<p>I don’t think there is a simple answer to the problem of why kids do this to themselves and each other. Some love to blame the greek system despite the abundant evidence that binging is rampant across greek and non-greek student populations alike.</p>
<p>I do think that it would be helpful for parents to stop romanticizing the “college experience” which they themselves had with underage alcohol. The mixed messages so many adults send to teens make it pretty unlikely that anything college administrators or law enforcement do will get to the root of the problem.</p>
<p>The only thing that will “get to the root of the problem” is for parents to stop drinking. There is no 19 year old on the planet who is going to believe a set of parents who drink alcohol when they tell them not to drink becuase it is dangerous.</p>
<p>Speaking as someone who never drank once in front of my kids, even the presence of alcohol in the culture, as the legal drug it is, is simply going to cause college students to drink. We tell them they are adults. Being an adult in our culture means drinking.</p>
<p>Prohibition was overturned long ago.</p>
<p>I know my kids believe me when I tell them drinking is dangerous. But, then, they know I do not drink. At the same time, I don’t believe ALL drinking is dangerous, binge drinking is dangerous. I know my kids believe me when I say that binge drinking is dangerous but that having a glass of wine with dinner is not. </p>
<p>If you are drinking alcohol in a responsible way? Your kids are not going to believe you when you tell them drinking is dangerous. Sorry to say.</p>
<p>It’s not all that common, though it does happen a lot more than you’d imagine (my alma mater has four or five dozen emergency pickups for the hospital each year because of major intoxication, with blood alcohol levels in some cases approaching or exceeding that known to cause death - they have no fraternities, and little hazing.) More common (a little under 12% of students per year on the Duke campus, and I picked them because they’ve actually collected the numbers, not because they are particularly bad) are alcohol blackouts, which have been shown to cause permanent neurological damage.</p>
<p>Parents should stop passing the bucks. It is not the responsibility of schools to educate our kids about alcohol, sex, and how to be a good and responsible citizens. It is us, as parents, who should be responsible for our kids. We like to blame the media, school, government about all the bad things that happen to our kids, but at the end of day we need to take some ownership. We expect the school to teach our kids about some of the most important values in life, when it should be us spending the time to have some of those difficult conversations with our kids.</p>
<p>D1 told me a month ago about the incident. She had tears in her eyes when talked about the student and how he was brought up by his single mother, and how hard it was for her to get her son to Cornell. The kids who were involved in the incident probably didn’t know the gravity of what they did on that night, but their lives are also ruined. It is all around very tragic for everyone involved.</p>