<p>“My real point is that college students either are adults or they are not adults.”</p>
<p>Is this really the only choice? Can they be adults in some ways, and not in others? Or adults in all ways, yet nevertheless held to some different requirements in certain regards, due to being members of a “risk group”?</p>
<p>Can society demand that some adults be subjected to some rules, while others aren’t? Because that group is at a different developmental stage of life?</p>
<p>For example, my understanding is seniors must get re-tested for drivers’ licenses more frequently than other adults, do you think this is somehow unfair? Are seniors adults, or aren’t they?</p>
<p>I have to admit, I’m torn about the drinking age thing. The US drinking age is higher than about anywhere else, it seems backward. And It was 18 for me, and I did my college thing with no permanent ill effects. And now we’re leaving the kids there saying they can’t go to bars, but we haven’t provided anything else viable for them to replace that, really. What are they supposed to do, play tiddlywinks?</p>
<p>Then, on the other hand there is all this MADD stuff and the statistics don’t lie. Maybe giving this group the full equal rights I think they deserve as adults, and I had at their age, comes at too high a cost to society, because developmentally they actually are not really fully adults yet.</p>
<p>Then on the third hand, prohibition has not really worked here all that well.</p>
<p>My D is a student there and a member of the greek system. Here is what she told me (this is not first hand knowledge): he was left alone in a room, attached to a chair. he had a bottle of liquor that he was supposed to drink until the pledeges found him. He drank the entire bottle and was unconscious when found. </p>
<p>Regardless , it was tragic and a waste of a bright young man. I too don’t know what the right answer is here. I had a long talk with her about alcohol and using it responsibly.</p>
<p>Schools have rules, but most of the time they seem to turn their backs and ignore the problem. Kids come back to the dorm totally incapacitated and vomiting; the RA’s are supposed to report it, but they don’t. Older students hold parties in their apartments and even if they make it clear that they will not serve alcohol to underage kids, those younger ones go out and “pre-game”, which is drinking as much as they can in the hours before the party (They also do this before events where they know they’ll be drinking anyway). Sometimes they end up back in their own beds (some even drive home!), and other times they crash on the floor wherever they land. I am aware of parents who know full well that their daughters and sons are doing this, yet they let her/him remain at school, with a car, and say nothing. I know that some of these kids party-hearty when at home too, and I can’t understand how they don’t smell the alcohol/pot on their kid when they get home!
If no rules are set at home, how can a young person be expected to behave when away at school? These same parents will be in line to take legal action against a school if something happens, when they never set limits to begin with.
I remember Parent’s Weekend before freshman year, when the dean droned on and on for two hours about mental health problems with young college kids, but nary a word about alcohol usage…</p>
<p><a href=“mailto:SV@”>SV@</a>. Thank you for posting Lucifers posts. I remember him well and read many posts from him. These are the very same arguments my two college age kids give me and they believe them as much as Lucifer did.</p>
<p>No amount of alcohol education made a dent to Lucifer and I find the same is true for my own two college students. </p>
<p>The entire culture has to change. It has to be unpopular to binge drink and pregame. i don’t know how to make it unpopular. I really don’t. </p>
<p>I do believe that no amount of education is going to help these kids. They all think they can handle it. They always believe it will NOT happen to them.</p>
<p>Sometime I think you are just lucky to survive those years between 15 and 25. So many stupid stunts…</p>
<p>Yes SV2, thanks very much for those links. While I was reading lucifer’s post I knew it reminded me of someone and it took me a minute to realize it sounded like Charlie Sheen. Lucifer is so defensive and determined to justify himself. His need to drink is motivating what he is saying, much like Charlie Sheen’s addicted brain is motivating what he is saying.</p>
<p>That is also a good post sax. I agree that endless repetition probably doesn’t make a dent in the mind of someone who doesn’t want to hear the message. But I do make sure that my kids know what alcohol poisoning is and how dangerous binge drinking is. I keep that message separate from the larger issue of underage drinking because I don’t want to dilute the message.</p>
<p>And it’s not just alcohol education. When I started school I went to an alcohol education program and a sexual assault awareness and prevention program and people were laughing and BSing through both of them. Kids just don’t want to be told that they can be hurt. It’s really frustrating for me as a college student because I am the weird one for considering safety issues when we decide to do something. I wonder if that kind of maturity can be gained any way but the hard way.</p>
<p>One contributing factor that concerns me are drinks such as Four Loko which is an energy drink combined with alcohol. By mixing a stimulant with a central nervous system depressant, kids may turning “off” the clues that the body gives them that they have had too much. </p>
<p>I don’t know if this was a factor in this case or in Lucifer’s, but kids need to understand that alcohol and caffeine are drugs too!</p>
<p>I think this drink is illegal in New York state, but I think it finds its way onto campus. This too could be a reason why someone who is “an experienced drinker” could consume way too much and feel very differently. This scares me a lot. </p>
<p>Can I just say as a parent, I didn’t know this stuff existed but learned about it from my kid. I think we as parents need to keep open lines of communication with our kids so that we can offer advice and hear about what they are being exposed to. As parents, if we have zero tolerance, we may not be offered the opportunity to provide advice to help our kids navigate all that is new at college. </p>
<p>I think we can still have standards and expectations, but we have to be informed and the best way to do that is to be able to have very honest conversations with our kids.</p>
<p>I think Four Loko showed up after Lucifer’s time. Lucifer’s death was quite a few years ago.</p>
<p>I have heard that students in New York state stocked up on Four Loko before it was banned. So the problems it contributes to won’t end immediately.</p>
<p>As for alcohol education, one of my kids had to do an online program before college started. I was in the room when she did it; I was interested, and she didn’t mind. She discovered that it was impossible to answer some of the questions accurately if you don’t drink. I wonder exactly what this program was supposed to teach if it couldn’t account for the possibility that the person taking the course was a nondrinker!</p>
<p>In my day there were no discussions about alcohol, drugs, drinking/driving, etc either in the home or at school. While there was a strong prevalence sex, drugs, alcohol, it was not to the extent that it is now. Sure kids threw up, passed out, but I never heard of anyone getting their stomach pumped, and certainly not dying from alcohol. With all the discussions, education, & information that this generation has been bombarded with since elementary school (compared to nothing in my time) why are things so much worse now? Shouldn’t the education have made it better? I have a hard time making sense of this.</p>
<p>Here’s more data on youth, college, and young adult alcohol and drug use that you’ll ever likely want. (And as you’ll see, college drinking is not worse than in 1991. However, some substudies from Wechsler et al. suggest that the reason it is down is because there are many more African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians at residential colleges today than in 1991, and binge drinking among white students may be up substantially.)</p>
<p>The national Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) indicates “heavy drinking” among 18-24 year olds generally speaking fell significantly between 2001 and 2009. (They have only been tracking binge drinking since 2006.) I’ve asked for the data files on 18-21s - I don;t think they have a separate data file for residential college students.)</p>
<p>My kids had to do the alcohol awareness online program-- both of them had the same problem as Marian’s with there not being choices for non-drinkers. They were actually annoyed that the school assumes that everyone will be drinking. </p>
<p>Yes, they say they have rules about alcohol in the dorms, underage drinking, etc, etc, but they certainly aren’t enforced.</p>
<p>One of the things we have found with high school kids is that bingeing rates tend to be higher not only among whites, but also that there seems to be a link with income (not personal income per se, but median income in the school catchment area). To the extent that residential college students tend to be wealthier than the norm, there may be some carryover.) (The same is not true of illicit drug use.)</p>
<p>What I’ve never seen is comparisons with European residential college students. College systems tend to be very different in Europe, and with many colleges not even maintaining residences - students simply live in town.</p>
<p>There are lots of state studies on this, and they all say the same thing.</p>
<p>I too see a disconnect in the data, and have asked national researchers about it, and they mostly shrug their shoulders. It has to do with “drinking intensity”. Both MTF and BRFSS seem to indicate that binge drinking, first among college students and among 18-24 year olds has declined modestly over the past 20 years/10 years. Yet, it seems that incidents of alcohol poisonings, emergency room use, etc. around college campuses seem (or at least it seems to many folks on this list) to be going up (though folks on this list may be particularly attuned just now - this is College Confidential.)</p>
<p>It may be that among some, intensity of drinking has changed, and it doesn’t show in the instruments. Binge drinking is defined as 5 or more drinks at one sitting (actually, it is a little bit more complicated than that, but it’s a reasonable place to start.) So if you’ve had four, you didn’t binge.</p>
<p>But now we have some experimental data. Researchers at Northern Illinois University actually had folks literally COUNT the number of drinks a person had before surveying them. They found that, on average, a person who had 5 drinks reported they had 4. So there is a distinct underestimate in the data that way. But more importantly, researchers at Duke had folks come in and measure out drinks. The average drinker, when asked to measure out a “drink”, measured out 1.8X the standard drink size.</p>
<p>So what does that mean? The four-drink (non-bingeing) drinker actually had 5. And each of those was 1.8X the standard drink size. In other words, the 4-drink drinker really had NINE drinks. Not all of them of course - just on average. So there is certainly a cohort of students where simply calling them binge drinkers does not account for the intensity of drinking; and a certain number of non-binge drinkers (or students who believe they are non-binge drinkers) drinking so much, they are getting themselves in trouble. This would begin (but just begin) to explain the almost 12% of Duke students who suffered an alcohol blackout in the previous year. Most people don’t blackout from 5 drinks (I’d be asleep! but that’s another story). And the national data are not capturing intensity, which is likely where the biggest acute (as opposed to chronic) problems are.</p>
<p>So, we now know that college students drink more than they should. OK, big news there. But the longer-term implications are much less negative assuming you are part of the 99.9% that makes it through with nothing worse than some bad hangovers. While there is unfortunately little data, the data there is suggets that college drinking is just that–drinking while in college. Once they move out of college into the real world the heavy drinking tends to cease rapidly.</p>
<p>Yes, Barrons, but what most of us who work in this field realize, whether we agree completely or not on what the research is telling us, is that the challenge is on keeping them alive on the way through college to that productive adult life you are pointing towards.</p>
<p>The goal of the research is to find solutions to the problems which exist and which are very dangerous during that time period. It’s not a throw away puzzle. It is one of the most frustrating questions in the alcohol and drug field and it is incredibly resistent to solutions. So, we talk. We are trying to find a way to at least mitigate the dangers.</p>
<p>What mini isn’t even talking about in that study is the drug problem that is currently rising in an epic way. But, it’s too depressing to even go into.</p>
<p>Good luck. I hope everyone’s kids stay safe. Talk to your kids about binge drinking on hard liquor until they find you annoying and then do so more. Do it every thursday afternoon if you can. Be a pest.</p>