Campus culture of drinking slow to change

[TexasStooge]

By ANDREW BECKER / The Dallas Morning News

NORMAN, Okla. – 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.

[gtalum]

IMHO this is all thanks to our asinine laws against drinking under the age of 21. Kids go to college with absolutely no experience in dealing with alcohol. It flows freely on college campuses regardless fo the laws. Prohibition just doens't work.

Other countries with more reasonable drinking ages just don't have the large-scale college binge drinking problems that we have.

[pojo]

Good luck with that! UW-Madison is the King of drinking schools! There were many years that Madison was not ranked on the party schools list due to the high amounts alcohol consumed and frequency of parties around campus. Two words...State St.

[Terrell]

IMHO this is all thanks to our asinine laws against drinking under the age of 21. Kids go to college with absolutely no experience in dealing with alcohol. It flows freely on college campuses regardless fo the laws. Prohibition just doens't work.

Other countries with more reasonable drinking ages just don't have the large-scale college binge drinking problems that we have.

I couldn't agree with you more.

[pojo]

Over here in the Middle East, there is no drinking age (at least where I'm at). All liquor purchases are tracked with a monthly card. Soldiers are allowed 3, yes 3 drinks per night. (there are ways to get around that, but it won't be discussed). There are 2 places on the base that we can buy drinks, both of which use the same tracking card and have the same choices of liquor.

[streetsoldier]

It should be noted that many college students are under extreme stress; and (using any of various "reasons", i.e frat parties, after-the-game bashes, etc.) are self-medicating via alcohol.

Believe it or not, the med schools and law schools are particularly vulnerable, post-graduate...if not booze, then "uppers" to get through the immense paperwork and long, grueling hours.

The fact is..none of it really "works", and all they're doing is setting themselves up for panic-anxiety attacks later on.

[Stratosphere747]

IMHO this is all thanks to our asinine laws against drinking under the age of 21. Kids go to college with absolutely no experience in dealing with alcohol. It flows freely on college campuses regardless fo the laws. Prohibition just doens't work.

Other countries with more reasonable drinking ages just don't have the large-scale college binge drinking problems that we have.

It's not so much the asinine laws against the under 21 drinking age GT, but the fact how we as a society approach issues such as this and teen pregnancy as well. It is far easier to turn the other cheek and not be embarrassed, then to actually confront and educate our youth head on.

Scott