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November 5, 2005
By Andrew Becker
Matt
McIntyre, a University of Oklahoma junior, has his fall schedule down:
Wednesday night is $1 pitchers, Thursday is party night, and drinking on
weekends is required.
"If
you don't go out, you're a dork," the 21-year-old accounting and finance
major said on a Saturday night as he waited to get into a bar.
"You're
not going to stop drinking. It's part of college life."
That
sentiment remains despite OU's alcohol ban at residence halls, fraternities and
sororities after an 18-year-old freshman died of alcohol poisoning last year.
Fraternity
keg parties, "beer pong" tournaments and dollar pitcher nights are
rites of passage for college students.
But authorities
are cracking down, saying alcohol is the common denominator not just in
flunking out but in campus rapes, criminal mischief and even deaths.
Spurred by
an evolving view of their community role, colleges and universities have made
strides against disruptive drinking with stricter policies, tough penalties and
more education. But researchers say students are doing more binge drinking,
which raises new challenges.
"It
makes it even more dangerous," said Richard Yoast of the American Medical
Association's Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse. "It wasn't always
this way."
And just as
students have conflicting views on alcohol, officials have different ideas on
how to curb destructive use.
"You
crack down on one area, and it moves to another area," said Drew Hunter,
president of the BACCHUS Network, a peer-based education program that focuses
on alcohol abuse and prevention.
To reduce
excessive drinking, many universities have turned to intervention, Web-based
self-assessment tests and even medical amnesty, a policy that shields students
from sanctions if they call for help because of an alcohol-related emergency.
Education
alone doesn't work, officials say. The same goes for scare tactics, such as
emphasizing alcohol deaths on campus.
"You
can educate students, but as long as alcohol is thrown at them ... they're
going to drink," said Henry Wechsler, a social psychologist and the
principal investigator of the College Alcohol Study, conducted by the Harvard
School of Public Health since 1992.
He said
limiting access is crucial to curbing consumption. "I don't want to knock
education ... but they have to do a lot more."
Binge
drinkers
The biggest
binge drinkers remain white males in the Greek system and some athletes, even
though they are targets of most information, Dr. Wechsler said. Though some
researchers dispute the term and definition, binge drinking is described by the
Harvard study as five drinks in a row by a man and four drinks by a woman on
one occasion.
Unlike
their grandparents' generation, today's college students drink to get drunk and
do so more frequently, Dr. Wechsler said. Nearly a quarter say they don't
drink, and almost 1 in 5 are binge drinkers, the Harvard researchers found.
At the University of Colorado, where freshman Lynn Gordon Bailey Jr., 18, of Dallas died of alcohol
poisoning last September, officials have intensified their efforts against
disruptive alcohol use.
Mr. Bailey
was found dead at the Chi Psi fraternity after a night of heavy drinking during
initiation. Pledges were taken to an area near Boulder and told to drink large
amounts of whiskey and wine. Mr. Bailey's blood-alcohol content was 0.328
percent, four times the state legal limit.
Disbelief
Along with
education, the university uses discipline, treatment programs and intervention
to combat the problem. It doled out 65 suspensions in the past year for
alcohol-related offenses.
Dr.
Wechsler said the overall effort has shown small but significant progress. But
roadblocks remain.
Grace
Filis, a 21-year-old senior from Glenwood Springs, Colo., admitted that when
she was a freshman she drank "to get wasted because I'd never done it
before." She said, however, that she was shocked by Mr. Bailey's death.
Her friend Cara Slaughter, 21, of Greeley, Colo., also a senior, registered a
different kind of disbelief.
"Who
just dies by drinking?" she said. "If you get to the point where you
drink that much, just throw up."
Self-assessments
Such an
attitude, counselors say, shows scare tactics don't work, because young adults
often see themselves as invulnerable. Instead, more universities, including
Southern Methodist University and next year the University of Texas at Austin, have taken a new approach: drinking self-assessment tests.
More than
450 universities use AlcoholEdu, a multimedia interactive program developed by
Outside The Classroom Inc., one of at least nine companies that offer such
products. It asks about alcohol use, family drinking history, athletic status
and other issues.
Most use it
as part of sanctions for alcohol offenses such as underage drinking, but 140
universities offer the course to new students.
The University of Illinois found that students who completed the program reported 50 percent
fewer negative health, social and academic problems related to drinking than
students who hadn't taken the course.
Other
researchers say knowledge-based prevention programs alone are ineffective in
behavior change. Outside The Classroom Inc. acknowledges that the course can't
be relied upon alone.
At the University of California, Berkeley, where a moratorium on alcohol at its 70 fraternities and
sororities went into effect in May, the course was required for the 6,900
incoming students this fall.
A 10- to
15-minute program developed at San Diego State University and UT has also
become popular. Check Up to Go, or e-CHUG, gives students an assessment of
their drinking habits. The program converts the amount of alcohol a student
consumes monthly to the equivalent number of cheeseburgers, a striking
comparison for some test-takers.
"A big
problem for a lot of university students is that they don't really know what
problem drinking is compared to non-problem drinking," the AMA's Mr. Yoast
said.
44
cheeseburgers
Dave
Pierson, 23, of New Orleans said the results of an e-CHUG test he took at UT
showed he drank more than 95 percent of males his age did.
"It
said I drank the equivalent of 44 cheeseburgers in a month," he said over
a noontime drink at Cain & Abel's, a bar on the west side of the Austin campus.
This year,
UT officials also added the medical amnesty policy, already in place at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and Emory University in Atlanta.
"One
reason alcohol poisoning deaths occur is that a student is left to 'sleep it
off' because other people are afraid of getting in trouble," said Chuck
Roper, coordinator of the Alcohol and Drug Education Program at UT.
Robert
Maust, head of a substance abuse panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said changing college culture isn't easy, especially when some believe it
isn't a school's responsibility to educate students on alcohol.
"If it
wasn't coming back to haunt us, it wouldn't be our business," he said.
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