<p>We have a daughter who is a senior in the Kelley School of Business and we just learned today that a freshman from Zionsville will be taken off of life support, following an alcohol related incident. This beautiful young lady had not even gone to school yet and her life is over. This kind of thing is happening all too frequently at IU. When is this madness going to stop? When will the university stop the madness or at least try and do something about it?</p>
<p>IU is strict on alcohol on campus. Otherwise not much to be done. Freshman tend to over due things at first.</p>
<p>This is a very unfortunate situation, and my sympathy to her family. The girl fell down stairs at an off campus house party. I dont know more details. But IU couldn’t have done anything about this, could they? ALL universities have students who are irresponsible and risky with alcohol, despite education programs, etc… Alcohol is not permitted on the IU campus, and they are very strict. But kids find ways…</p>
<p>Yes, unfortunately most of the really sad stories are not related to the colleges directly and dorm life. Most universities are not really in a position to try an sort out who is 21, who is 24 …and who is 18.</p>
<p>This is not unique to any one school - details of last years incident at Northern Illinois were also made public yesterday. Unfortunately, I believe many of these incidents are of our own making. </p>
<p>I have family in Canada and travel frequently to Europe - this is practically unheard of anywhere else in western civilization - because we are virtually the only country outside the Muslim world where a college student can not legally drink! Sure college age kids get drunk in other countries, but they don’t drink themselves to death! If you can legally go to the bar, you do not feel compelled to “drink every available drop” or put up with hazing rituals to secure your access to alcohol.</p>
<p>Canadian newspapers have written frequently about this huge blind spot in the American policy. Canada has had the same steep decrease in drunk driving as the U.S. over the past 30 years without any province raising the drinking age. Drunk driving can and has been reduced without infringing on young adults civil rights - designated drivers work regardless of age.</p>
<p>I hold out no hope of this well intentioned, but misguided policy changing - short of a reinstituted draft. Unfortunately most Americans are woefully uninformed - they believe the drinking age is 21 everywhere in the world. If they hear of say a lower age in England, they assume it is an outlier - not that the U.S. is the global odd duck.</p>
<p>I’m all about punishing drunk driving to the max. Not so fond of the 21 year old drinking age. IMO it’s led to this concept of speed/binge drinking and hiding out from the cops which isn’t good.</p>
<p>I’m not so sure legal drinking age is the problem. I think its something about our culture at US colleges. I don’t think underage drinking is as big a problem with working people who don’t go to college.</p>
<p>I think you would be wrong. Although many now prefer pills like Oxy and meth.</p>
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<p>Not at all accurate, I’m not really sure where you’d get this notion. The vast majority of DUI cases are poor people and repeat offenders. College/highschool kids get a lot as well, but if you took out the ‘fake’ DUIs (some states have 0 tolerance, any alcohol = DUI when under 21), its a fairly insignificant number. If anyone has the data on population of people receiving DUIs, please share it.</p>
<p>A lot of colleges are really good about providing transportation late at night (UNC comes to mind), but most just leave the students to fend for themselves with cabs or walking/driving. This is fine in Chicago or NY, but in most college towns it leaves students kind of in the lurch walking across campus if cabs aren’t available, which can get increasingly dangerous and greatly incentivizing drinking and driving. </p>
<p>Anecdotally:
At South Carolina specifically, cabs disappear from the bar scenes around 130-2am, right around closing time. This is usually fine, but walking around campus and 5 points have becoming increasingly dangerous since I lived there making walking not really an option. They had for one semester a “Cocky’s Caravan” that provided all night bus service, but of all groups, MADD threw an absolute fit about it encouraging underage drinking. It would seem to me this actually encouraged drinking and driving</p>
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<p>Completely agree. In columbia SC you’d hear about a shooting in 5 points the same night they were ‘raiding’ a college bar. Nonsensical. Focus on making drinking and driving not an option. I do have to say I don’t like the checkpoints though- I was held at one for over an hour because i spilled a beer on myself during a Blackhawks game. It seems to me they get a lot of .08-.15 drivers, and not the .20+ ones that kill families.</p>
<p>I am not sure that strict on campus alcohol rules actually do much good in curbing alcohol related injuries or deaths. If a college student wants to get a hold of booze, there is very little that the university or society can really do about it (raise a hand anyone on this forum who REALLY never ever drank underage at university). I would probably say that looser drinking restrictions might be better so that students can party at bars and in large open groups rather than being forced to drink in less safe environments. Also if it isn’t forbidden, it seems that young adults are actually less prone to abuse alcohol. </p>
<p>Case in point at McGill, (in Quebec where the drinking age is 18) every year about now and in to the beginning of September the freshmen come into campus and they usually party and get drunk for a week or two, then afterwards the novelty wears off and you don’t see a lot of ****ed (seriously CC censors p i s s e d?!) drunk students from then on (the week after final exams being a notable exception). That’s not to say you don’t still get students drinking socially during the year, but I find that you generally don’t see them consuming the vast amounts of alcohol at events like keggers that lead to all the alcohol related deaths that we see in the news.</p>
<p>In summary, it seems that strict anti drinking laws and rules if anything seem to pressure underage students to binge drink in large quantities when they get the chance, whereas looser alcohol regulations paradoxically teach students drink in moderation.</p>
<p>The book referred to in this interview looks at the drinking culture in a dozen American colleges versus McGill:</p>
<p>[Drinking</a> outside the box](<a href=“http://www.mcgill.ca/reporter/38/01/drinking/]Drinking”>http://www.mcgill.ca/reporter/38/01/drinking/)</p>
<p>My understanding was that the drinking age in the US was raised in response to highway deaths and that the deaths dropped afterwards. I would be very interested if anyone can confirm or refute this understanding.</p>
<p>It was tied to highway money.</p>
<p>The drinking age was 18 when I was in college. Lots of people got really drunk, a lot. However, I do not remember doing shots ever or hearing about people doing that.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.centurycouncil.org/sites/default/files/materials/SODDFIA.pdf[/url]”>http://www.centurycouncil.org/sites/default/files/materials/SODDFIA.pdf</a> (page 8) lists alcohol-related driving fatalities by year. The next page lists under-21 alcohol-related driving fatalities by year.</p>
<p>The first full year after the 21-drinking-age-or-lose-your-federal-highway-money law was 1985. Those charts show a dip that year, but then an increase in 1986 to return to the previous trend line.</p>
<p>More information about trends in drunk driving:
<a href=“http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810942.pdf[/url]”>http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810942.pdf</a></p>
<p><<<<<<i’m not="" so="" sure="" legal="" drinking="" age="" is="" the="" problem.="" i="" think="" its="" something="" about="" our="" culture="" at="" us="" colleges.="" don’t="" underage="" as="" big="" a="" problem="" with="" working="" people="" who="" go="" to="" college.="">>>>>></i’m></p>
<p>I wouldn’t agree with that statement and I’d cite the U. S. military as a prime example of high underage drinking rates among employed people not attending college.</p>
<p>mini, has said that there was a drop in every state that adopted the 21 drinking age, and that you could see the results state by state as they adopted the law at different times. Those charts don’t show that level of detail.</p>
<p>There’s a fair amount of research showing that there’s not really more responsible drinking in Europe: <a href=“Redirect Notice”>Redirect Notice;
<p><a href=“Redirect Notice”>Redirect Notice; etc.</p>
<p>This same argument about the drinking age comes up every time there’s a post about a college age drinking death. Does anyone really think a 19 y/o will drink less simply because it’s legal for them to drink? Do you really think they drink more simply because it’s illegal? Or does it make more sense that the excessive drinking isn’t related to the legality at all and is more related to the social environment where they’re doing the drinking? The latter makes the most sense to me.</p>
<p>I looked for an article on this incident and it states it hasn’t been determined yet whether the student had been drinking, was drunk, etc. although of course she may have been. She was injured when she fell down some stairs. The people with her didn’t realize the seriousness of the situation - not surprising given their ages. </p>
<p>A couple of snippets from an article on this - </p>
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<p>According to the Indiana Daily Student, hours passed between when others at the party found her at the bottom of the stairs and when someone called for help.</p>
<p>Ah. Cross posted. Thanks for the information on the Lifeline law. I thought I remembered something but hadn’t figured out how to find it.</p>
<p>@GladGradDad
To answer your question,
This is an excerpt from the source tomofboston (post 11) provided:</p>
<p>“The students at McGill took alcohol in stride,” he says. “It was there, it was available; they didn’t feel the need to drink as much as possible because they knew they could get it anywhere. I made a point of talking to the Americans there — I didn’t just want to say, ‘Canadians are better at this’ — and they would say how blown away they were by faculty handing them beers in the first week of school. So most would overindulge, along with the Canadians, but by the time mid-terms rolled around, they’d buckle down.”</p>
<p>Flo Tracy, who’s been McGill’s director of housing for 26 years and who spoke to Seaman during his stay there, says Quebec’s lower drinking age of 18, as opposed to the average of 21 in the U.S., is partly to credit for the healthier relationship her students have with alcohol.</p>
<p>“But,” she adds, “the big thing is that we create a safe space — a community where one doesn’t have to prove oneself as much.”</p>
<p>It is not so much that the students drink less in say any given week, more that they drink less at one time than students at many American universities (and hence less risk of alcohol related deaths or serious injury), since there is less pressure to binge when they can get alcohol whenever they want and not fell obligated to consume as much booze as possible in the exceptional times it is available in large quantities at US universities (say at a frat party).</p>