<p>I did not have time to read through the whole thread, but I find it really depressing how parents are using the deaths of other teenagers to justify these complete generalizations of college students.
I’m interested in the data on binge drinking over the years from the time the parents here were in school, to now. Also the drunk driving statistics (if those are available so far back). Whether or not binge drinking has increased or stayed constant I’m not sure, but I am willing to bet that drunk driving has gone down.</p>
<p>My school has several alcohol policies in place. One is the good samaritan law, in which if you call for help for a friend neither you or the friend can get in trouble. The only problem with this is that only one caller can fall under this. Also, if you call the RA it doesn’t count, but the RA usually tells the required people and you don’t end up with much of a charge.
The second one is that your body is not a container. You cannot get in trouble for being drunk, just the act of posession. As a result, we’re not afraid to go to our dorms drunk. My friends at different schools have heard of situations where people ended up hurt or dead because they were afraid to go home.
If you google my schools name (UMD) and alcohol death, the first reference of an actual occurence is something that happened in 2002, before these policies were in place. This isn’t as impressive at a smaller school, but with more than 30K undergrads, 1 alcohol poisioning death in eight years is beating the population as a whole.</p>
<p>Well, in one sense, Barrons is right. There is a smallish (we think) class of superbingers who probably account for the vast majority of really serious acute problems (emergency room visits, etc.) We don’t have a count of them, and we don’t have any trend data.</p>
<p>Then there is a class of drinkers associated with a huge number of rapes, sexual assaults, and assaults on campus, and property damage.</p>
<p>Then there is a class of heavy drinkers who do not experience acute problems, but will end up with serious alcohol problems/alcoholism later in life (roughly 15% of the college population, which amounts to around 40% of the heavy drinkers (near daily drinkers - not the bingers - there is no clearcut association with the bingers, so in that sense Barrons is correct again.) Some of them won’t, but will have experienced blackouts, with permanent neurological damage which will never be tracked (people will think there were always “like that”.)</p>
<p>But then there is your kid, the moderate drinker. Or so you think. Or so he thinks. Sonny Boy told you he went to a party this weekend. He tells you he had only two drinks. Okay, well, he lied, he actually had 4. Or so he thinks. If there was someone there counting, it was five. Well, except each one was 1.8X the standard drink. So he really had 9 (maybe more). He doesn’t understand why with only 4 drinks he ended up puking his guts out. But you think he is a moderate drinker. He told you so, and he almost believes it. Most likely, after age 24, if he is like the majority of folks, he won’t binge any more (though he didn’t really know he was binging now.) Or he might end up with liftetime problems - much of this is luck of the genetic draw.</p>
<p>Thanks for breaking it down in such a rational way, mini (sorry for misspelling your name earlier, btw). I really think you’ve captured the reality of the situation. A dear friend of mine has a daughter at a well-known university, and she’s really concerned about her alcohol consumption although she is powereless to do anything about it since the girl has turned 21 this past year.</p>
<p>This girl is graduating on time and has already secured a really great job post-graduation but her own self-reported behavior clearly qualifies her as a binge drinker. Her parents’ worried talks with her fall on deaf ears because the type of drinking she does is so common among her peers and accepted in the college environment. She honestly thinks it’s “normal” and nothing to be worried about.</p>
<p>She seems (so far) to be one of the lucky ones, who don’t get into any serious trouble as a result of her drinking. She seems to have developed a huge tolerance for very high levels of alcohol, which would render me unconscious and can do this several times per week without derailing her otherwise successful life. Her parents are praying that once she leaves the university environment and enters the working world, her drinking will become more moderate. I hope so too, but I have no doubt that she’s put herself at higher than average risk of a long-term problem.</p>
<p>Unless there’s a change in college culture, I just don’t know what can be done to limit this behavior.</p>
<p>I really think the drinking age should be 18. I also think that it would be even better if it were 18 for beer and wine and 21 for hard stuff. Obviously, you can become an alcoholic drinking beer and wine, but you’re MUCH less likely to die of alcohol poisioning. </p>
<p>And, I’d set it up in my dream world so that everyone would have to eat something before drinking and would drink lots of water interspersed with the beer and wine. </p>
<p>One reason I dislike colleges with strict enforcement policies is that they tend to create separate partying circuits. So the moderate drinkers are going to parties which the non-drinkers don’t attend. I think folks, even adults, tend to drink about the meidan amount as other guests at a party. So, when the non-drinkers just aren’t present, the social drinkers drink more than they do if the non-drinkers are there. I also think that when there’s a healthy percentage of non-drinkers present, kids are less likely to play dumb drinking games than they are if everyone present drinks. It’s also less likely that someone who really doesn’t want to particpate will get pressured into doing it. </p>
<p>Plus, I think it’s hard to be a non-drinker at schools with strict enforcement policies, especially if you’re not religious. Maybe it’s unique to the schools I’m most familiar with, but at those, most of the non-drinkers don’t drink for religious reasons-- they are Evangelical Protestants, Mormons, etc. And the kid who just doesn’t want to drink or the rare kid who wants to wait until it’s legal to do so, feels like (s)he just doesn’t fit in.</p>
<p>I drink. I have several close friends who don’t drink at all or who drink very little. We still go out to dinner together or otherwise socialize. The 21 year old drinking age creates this weird artificial divide at some colleges between the kids who don’t drink at all and the rest of the campus. So, the social drinkers end up hanging out with the “buzzed from Thursday night to Sunday night” crowd. As a result, they drink more than they would if there were also lots of non-drinkers present.</p>
<p>So, personally, from what I’ve seen, the 21 year old drinking age may have upped the percentage of kids who don’t drink at all slightly, but it’s also upped the amount that kids who do drink imbibe.</p>
<p>Thanks for posting the Lucifer story links. I had come across the story of this young man’s death but I had not realized what he had posted on cc.</p>
<p>When someone claims to be an “experienced” drinker, who knows how to handle his or her drinking, this should raise all kinds of red flags as to an alcohol problem. I don’t think education can help someone so far gone, but maybe it helps someone who is on the brink. We can never know who was saved from an alcohol death due to education.</p>
<p>Mini, I thank you for your great links, and for caring.</p>
<p>Lucifer’s death was strictly alcohol-related.</p>
<p>But it appears that alcohol was not the only factor in the death of the young man whose story was told at the start of this thread. Hazing apparently played a role, too. I know that attempts are being made to educate students on the subject of hazing, but perhaps they need to be stronger – and so do enforcement efforts.</p>
<p>It’s such a terribly sad situation. We must be aware of what our kids are doing and we can’t give up talking to them about the dangers of drinking too much. Sometimes I think the parents are the ones that think their kids are invinceable</p>