BINGE - What your college student won't tell you

Parents Forum
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<p>repost</p>

<p><a href="http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/default.aspx%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/default.aspx&lt;/a>
This website has many useful documents and links that explore the issue of alcohol use on college campuses in great detail, presenting research about the scope of the problem, and making recommendations to students, parents, and college officials to improve the situation.</p>

<p>College Drinking, Changing The Culture
by the Task Force on College Drinking of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism</p>

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<p>this link also has good resources about other safety issues on campus that may be exacerbated by substance use
<a href="http://www.securityoncampus.org/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.securityoncampus.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Ditto lelalellen! - Myspace.com has some agenda I have not figured out- all I know is that my daughter and her friends all signed on....They had to claim that they were 17 years old to sign up! They are 13-15 years old) We were disturbed that she would outright lie to get into the site..I clicked on all her buddies and found all her friends with posted pics of themselves in very sexy poses. These are the kids that played in our neighborhood at 4 years old +.....the cute ,innocent kids of the neighborhood.....All I know is that their parents would flip if they saw their precious "A" students writing and posing in such a manner. The so called creator of this site has pictures of his girlfriends that seem to be posed in a soft porn way. Her friends all joined what was called a "Sexy chat room" shall I go on? .....since myspace.com showed up on our computer our house has been upside down. It may be a coincidence that myspace.com showed up the same time we have been dealing with other issues with our D. I think not.... The spyware programs caught more objects than previously which says to me that myspace may have an agenda other than providing a free website product. Because of all of this our D has had no cell phone or internet for the past 2 weeks.....she has read books,wrote two stories and several songs. hmmmmmmthe way it should be....My S on the other hand never had a drink in his life till he got to college. Tequila was the first for him. He says that at least 70% of the kids at his state school drink and then they "Act like idiots". He claims that he has no interest in drinking but that the peer pressure is intense.</p>

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<p>MySpace, Live Journal, Facebook, etc., can come back to haunt these kids down the road. Here's one of several recent articles on the subject: <a href="http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/10/03/online%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/10/03/online&lt;/a>. The article discusses "googling" -- what I don't think it mentions is the Google cache. You can take down a page, but if Google has already found it, it's cached and it never actually dies; it is there in the Google results as a clickable link. How many non-techie kids, even college students, know this? It is very risky to put personally compromising material on the Internet.</p>

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<p>mini:
I suppose family income would correlate to some degree with kids drinking - only because rich kids have more money to spend on booze. But I still find that very hard to believe. I wonder if that is true in the general population? That there are more alcoholics/drug addicts among upper class than middle-lower class people? Could be. I don't know. </p>

<p>I understand the Wechsler studies are a constant source of controversy - and not being a statistician I really don't know who to believe. Sure, I'd LOVE to believe some colleges have found substantive ways to deal with the problem. But, outside of very fundamentalist schools, I just don't believe that they have. </p>

<p>For instance, your example of Hobart & William Smith. That school is close to us and I know several kids who go there. Believe me, there is a big drinking problem on that campus too. </p>

<p>Here are quotes from Hobart on Campusdirt.com. If they have improved their drinking situation, wow, it's a good thing. </p>

<p>
[quote]
Quote 1 of 12 “I am ordering dinner out, pre-gaming in someone's room, usually heading to a frat party or just playing drinking games in someone's room, and then heading downtown around 11-11:30.”</p>

<p>Quote 2 of 12 “Most students have small gatherings in their rooms to pre-game, then go to one or more of the small bars downtown via the "drunken bus", then most go home to sleep but some go to after-hours parties at the fraternities.”</p>

<p>Quote 3 of 12 “Get hammered in your rooms then go to frat drink more go to bars gets retarded come back and sleep with your girl then crash.”</p>

<p>Quote 4 of 12 “Sometimes you do have to make your own fun but alcohol is easy to get and bars are not strict. There are not a lot of bars but the ones we have are kind of like cheers where everyone knows your name. By the time you are a junior the frat scene does start to get old, but you can always count on that one bar you have here that is like home.”</p>

<p>Quote 5 of 12 “Everyone pre-games either in their dorm rooms, fraternities, or off-campus residences then proceeds downtown to the bars!”</p>

<p>Quote 6 of 12 “Everyone goes downtown and gets trashed.”</p>

<p>Quote 7 of 12 “I hang out with friends and maybe go over to a bar.”</p>

<p>Quote 8 of 12 “Hanging out at home watching TV.”</p>

<p>Quote 9 of 12 “I party in the dorms and the fraternity houses.”</p>

<p>Quote 10 of 12 “Pregame, go to the lacrosse houses then hit the bars”</p>

<p>Quote 11 of 12 “Small parties in the dorms.”</p>

<p>Quote 12 of 12 “I am at the bars drinking.”

[/quote]
</p>

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<p>"I suppose family income would correlate to some degree with kids drinking - only because rich kids have more money to spend on booze. But I still find that very hard to believe. I wonder if that is true in the general population? That there are more alcoholics/drug addicts among upper class than middle-lower class people? Could be. I don't know."</p>

<p>I do this for a living! Need for treatment rates are slightly higher among those under 200% of the federal poverty line than those above. But, within the numbers are wide variations. Alcohol dependency rates are much higher among whites than among African Americans, regardless of income, as are methamphetamine addiction and addiction to prescription opiates. Cocaine use rates among African Americans are much higher than among whites. Among Hispanics, alcohol use rates are substantially higher among those with higher incomes. </p>

<p>Regardless of how you feel about the Wechsler studies, one thing they do without question is ask the questions in the same way each time, so comparative rates are clear.</p>

<p>Now, you need to remember that the average "binge drinking" rate at American colleges (in the prior two weeks) is 43%. So when the University of Arizona lowered its rate from 44% to roughly 30% (which is the same as Swarthmore's), it represented a HUGE reduction, but it was still true that almost one out of 3 students was binge drinking. Same at Hobart and William Smith. 30% is an awful lot of binge drinking you might say, until you consider that it is 52% at Williams. The question is whether there are proven ways to reduce pregaming and binge drinking on campuses, and the answer to that is an unequivocal yes. If you asked whether colleges could eliminate such behavior, the answer would most certainly be no.</p>

<p>All campuses have substantial numbers of abstainers - generally 20-30% of the student population. The real question is whether, among the rest of the population, moderate drinking or binge drinking is the norm - what is the culture like? And for that, you can do the numbers yourself. Most if not all of the successful interventions do not aim at increasing the percentage of abstainers, but in decreasing the incidence of binge drinking, or problem drinking, and creating a campus culture where this is not the norm.</p>

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<p>In case anyone is interested, there are a couple of search engines that search blogs only that don't normally show up when you google. I've found things posted about my ds--along with pictures(a girl has a crush on him)--which he wasn't aware of.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.technorati.com/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.technorati.com/&lt;/a>
<a href="http://blogs.icerocket.com/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://blogs.icerocket.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Write- ahh, it's so nice to have a common name and a random nickname- the only way to find my blog on those sites is to google my personal screenname- one I never give out to corporate types.</p>

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<p>muppetcoat--I actually wish I had a common last name!</p>

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<p>I found some posts refering to my younger daughter by using her first name and the school she goes to ( one of her friends is a frequent poster- mostly *****ing about her classes)
I also found posts that linked my older daughters screen name by searching for her screen name- nothing came up with either of their last names.
I already read those though ;)</p>

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<p>"Binge drinking" is a meaningless term. All it means is five MEDICAL drinks over the course of a night. If a fairly average, totally unordinary 180 pound male has 6 beers over a 8-2 or 9-3 night, that's binge drinking, despite the fact that he would have essentially no alcohol in his blood at the end of his night.</p>

<p>A lady who has two reasonably strong margarita's binged. One mixed drink will set many kids to binging at most colleges.</p>

<p>All of you who advocate kicking kids out of college for getting drunk are totally misguided. Why is it wrong for someone to get drunk 3 times? Because they are under an arbitrarily defined age? Because they did something that COULD be bad for them? Would you suspend/expel kids from college for eating too much pizza and getting fat (obesity is every bit as bad for you as drinking, and in many cases is much worse; obesity is certainly much more prevalent than alcoholism, and causes many more problems; alcohol can trash your liver and damage your heart, obesity can trash your liver, heart, put you at risk of most every sort of cancer, give you high blood pressure, etc...)?</p>

<p>Additionally, here are FAR greater threats to America's health than alcohol. You'd all be better off focusing on requiring excercise at all colleges, getting healthier food into meal halls, or making fast food less accessible, if you're going down the (rather foolish) path of trying to regulate people into health.</p>

<p>There isn't even much of a point to drinking 3 or 4 beers over a five or six hour night - most people won't feel much, if anything. From a logical standpoint, "binge" drinking is the only way to experience the effects of alcohol over a long (5-6 hour) night.</p>

<p>One MAJOR problem with the studies conducted at colleges is that most kids have NO IDEA how much they drink, and many lie on the surveys, especially if there is any reason for them to assosciate admitting to drinking with getting in trouble (first part is proven fact (it was a prominatnly featured fact in the alcohol education that Cornell put us through that most people underestimate by 92+% the amount of alcohol in the mixed drinks they have), second part is anecdotal experience).</p>

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<p>Oh, and I might add, spying on your kids: not condusive to the kind of behavior you expect of them.
It's all connected--the whole big wide world; take a look, it's all around you!</p>

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<p>How about we reflect just a moment on this whole child rearing thing. It's easy for enforcement to achieve some success if our will is all that matters. Up to a point, pressure can be applied and depending on how ruthless we are, predictable results will follow. But those results won't last, and, of course, the desired behavior will not be regenerative. In order to achieve true, lasting change, it's not laws or their like that will carry the day. As parents we should take more responsibility for our children than the common pet owner. I say that for the first infraction, the parent of the binge drunkard should be publicly humiliated. Second infraction, a wider circle of family members and friends should be included in this very public shaming. If the behavior continues, evermore widening circles of responsible "adults" who have in one way or another influenced the growth and management of the perpetrator should be brought into the mix and heaped with reprobation. If this does nothing to halt the faithful binger, then I suppose we'll just have to conclude that he or she is a bad seed and be done with it. At any rate, I think it our utmost duty to prepare our children for life BEFORE we send them off to camp. Let's face it, as a species, we do a pretty bad job of raising the bar.</p>

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<p>"Binge drinking" is a meaningless term. All it means is five MEDICAL drinks over the course of a night. If a fairly average, totally unordinary 180 pound male has 6 beers over a 8-2 or 9-3 night, that's binge drinking, despite the fact that he would have essentially no alcohol in his blood at the end of his night."</p>

<p>The average "binge drinker" in the college surveys actually had 8.75 alcoholic drinkers in a four-hour sitting. We know this not because of surveys, but because of actually observed behavior. It was found that college students on average underestimate the number of drinks they have in an episode by a little over one drink. And when asked to pour out a "standard" drink, s/he on average pours out one that is 1.75 the standard. In short, someone who is classified as a non-binge drinker because they had "only 3 drink." on average may actually have had 7. </p>

<p>The point is that the major problem with the surveys is that they significantly underestimate both the extent and impact of problem drinking.</p>

<p>As far as enforcement goes, I don't see it for the most part as "enforcement" at all. The colleges own and operate group congregant residential facilities, and as such are liable for what happens inside them, including infractions of law if it can reasonably perceived that they knew what goes on inside them. Most of the "best practices" are not about enforcement regarding individual students at all, but social norms marketing (where rates are relatively lower to begin with), restrictions on premises operated by the college, and prohibitions against suppliers rather than drinkers. </p>

<p>"In order to achieve true, lasting change, it's not laws or their like that will carry the day. "</p>

<p>Beg to differ. Laws have made a huge impact. The combination of enforced seat belt laws, the rise in the legal drinking age, and the no-tolerance statutes for teenage DUIs has saved tens of thousands of lives. They do so NOT because of enforcement (no more than 1 in 50 drinking teenage drivers are ever caught), but because of cultural changes that accompany them. That we may not like the laws is another issue, but to argue that they have no impact flies in the face of decades of evidence.</p>

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<p>Mini,
Might it be that simultaneously the higher drinking age could have produced one desirable affect- lower incidence of alcohol related car fatalities, and one undesirable affect- increase in binge drinking.</p>

<p>I am pretty sure that in cultures which accomodate the use of alcohol, in a limited and social sense- usually in mixed age groups, before the age of 18 even- there is a lower incidence of alcoholism. I am not sure if there is also a lower incidence of binge-ing, however. You would know better than I. </p>

<p>The model of adults and what they 'normalize' in terms of behavior as teens are maturing is key- I remember in high school (I was in a boarding school) girls from another country routinely binged and purged with food. I found it revolting, and then learned that it was a trick their mothers had taught them- everyone did it. If kids are learning to use alcohol safely and sensibly and they see a model of adults doing so, it seems to me that it influences their behavior tremendously. On the other hand, if they are seeing binge-ing as the normalized behavior, that becomes the greater influence as you have noted. </p>

<p>What I really don't get about binge drinking is this. You feel so lousy afterwards....how can anyone want to do it again? The peer pressure to want to relive the 'highlights' and forget the obvious low points related to the experience must be extraordinary.</p>

<p>I should also say that where we live the kids do not drink and drive, because they do not drive! That changes the paradigm considerably.</p>

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<p><< "Binge drinking" is a meaningless term. All it means is five MEDICAL drinks over the course of a night. If a fairly average, totally unordinary 180 pound male has 6 beers over a 8-2 or 9-3 night, that's binge drinking, despite the fact that he would have essentially no alcohol in his blood at the end of his night.>></p>

<p>Lucifer - I'm not sure your statement about having "essentially no alcohol in his blood at the end of his night" is correct. I believe several hours later that drinker would still be in violation of the zero tolerance levels that teenage drivers are held to, and even if the drinker were below the .08 limit, he may still be impaired and should be aware of that. I've seen a chart that shows how long alcohol stays in the body as a function of amount of alcohol consumed and body weight (and gender, too, I think), but I can't locate it this morning. Of course, the value of the chart is limited if you can't accurately report how much you drank.</p>

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<p>"Might it be that simultaneously the higher drinking age could have produced one desirable affect- lower incidence of alcohol related car fatalities, and one undesirable affect- increase in binge drinking."</p>

<p>Not likely, but the data show some interesting stuff: first of all, much lower alcohol-related car fatalities, accidents, injuries, etc. We are talking hundreds of thousands of lives (and limbs) saved here. Alcohol abstinence rates are, in the general population, somewhat higher than 30 years ago. Total consumption of alcohol has been dropping over the past two decades. At the same time, both chronic and binge drinking among adults has been increasing over the past two decades. In other words, fewer drinkers, less alcohol consumed, but more folks getting into trouble from/with it.</p>

<p>It is likely (the data suggest it, but are not conclusive) that the increased chronic and binge drinking among adults has its roots in the same among youth. Chronic drinking (a minimum of two or more drinks per day per month) has doubled among adults since 1995, with a tripling among recent college graduates. The increases in binge drinking among young, post-18-year-old folks seem relatively confined to residential colleges - note, however, that at this point it is not increasing, but seems to have leveled off (at new, higher levels). Binge drinking among college students (44% in 2001) is roughly twice that of adults generally. Non-college youth are not bingeing more; nor are low-income youth. Alcohol abuse and dependency among African Americans (including youth), very low to begin with, are at all-time lows. </p>

<p>Perhaps it means that college students feel more "pressure" to perform than ever before, a pattern begun in high school, and they've learned that this is one "culturally normative" way to blow off steam. The good news, however, is that there are colleges, even very large ones like the University of Arizona, that have shown there are ways to change the cultural norms, if the will is there. Doesn't in any way do away with binge or problem drinking, but can change the culture of the school. But the school has to want to do it.</p>

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<p>I agree, it would be silly to argue that laws have no effect, I merely question their ability to modify long-term behavior, in essence. We would all agree that civilization is law-centric and yet I think we close our eyes to just how thin a veneer the rule of law remains in our everyday interactions. It's easy to do this. After all, we generally lead unconscious lives (please, no spirited defenses of our progress). The recent looting in NO, silly pronouncements about the rights of Americans all over the world, the many state sponsored killings and corruptions and self-serving justifications (and not just ours) for what those in power construe as the rule of right--all of this and much, much more speaks to the transient nature of our social engineering. We are Romans afterall, for good or ill. I'm just thinking that intercession is required at a different level of development. As Robert Bolt has Thomas More recite, "I give the devil benefit of the law for my own safety's sake." Fine and good, but laws function in the realm of "rights"; I, on the other hand, perfer Simone Weil's formulation of a society built on the solid foundation of obligations. Hence--though I'm really not so far gone as to believe it possible--shame as a way of taking up responsibility. It's a two-way street.</p>

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<p>The alcohol-related hospitalization statistics have exploded this year. At many colleges, including both "party" schools and elites, the number of kids hauled off to the hospital in the first two weeks of school were two to 10 times the number for the entire previous year. (Sometimes a student will pretend to peers and extended family members to have been taken for "food poisoning".) And officially defining binge-drinking as 5 or more drinks per night, as rightly pointed out by other posters, does not reflect what's going on. We are talking obscene amounts of alcohol by a significant percentage of kids, which I am afraid eventually raises (or lowers) the bar for the rest of campus. </p>

<p>One aspect of undergrad drinking that is different from the 60's and 70's is there is less social interaction between faculty and students, especially as was practiced at LACs. A professor then was able to stop in the student pub for a beer with students, have them over for wine with dinner, attend wine-and-cheese parties with a mix of faculty and students, and generally model decent adult drinking behavior. Now they are terrified of being seen near any student drinking, which keeps them away from students on campus. I believe in most cases the "good old days" were not as good as our rose-tinted memories suggest, but still, there is a loss there... Sigh.</p>

<p>Louie</p>

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<p>my daughters LAC does have students over for dinner at profs houses, and freshman have been seen having a glass of wine with dinner in the commons. This is a very small school however- where profs often take their meals in commons with students and there isn't a student pub ( although there are certainly off campus nearby taverns where they can get their fill of ( yuck) PBR</p>

<p>I think that what I have observed are students who have several means of blowing off steam besides getting plastered. The very few events that students tend to be inebriated at, are ones that my daughter and her friends tend to leave early or avoid altogether.
( 40s night apparently doesn't have anything to do with the WWll era)</p>