A Plea to End Binge Drinking

Binge drinking is not a new phenomenon on American college campuses. The presence of the Sheriff of Middlesex County at the head of the academic processions in Harvard Yard was traced by President Neil L. Rudenstine to the need to control drunk and disorderly behavior at graduations in colonial times. The tradition of heavy alcohol use by college students is part of the history of most institutions. Listen to almost any college song, and you are bound to hear about young men hoisting their beer mugs in tribute to their alma mater. Colleges have had a long-term affair with beer.

In some ways, things have remained the same. A few years ago the time of graduation at one Ivy League school was changed in order to hold down the number of intoxicated students. In the past two years riots have occurred at other colleges when drinkers have felt that their liquor supply was threatened. At one college even the change from daylight-saving to standard time resulted in a noisy disturbance, because bars were closing one hour earlier. What has changed is that today many colleges are publicly discussing and beginning to address the problem.

A recent ad placed in major national newspapers by the presidents of 113 colleges and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges announced a joint effort to deal with the problem of student binge drinking. This advertising campaign signals a major change in the way that colleges are responding to the alcohol problem on their campuses. The problem has moved from the agenda of assistant deans of students to the desks of college presidents. It is openly discussed in the New York Times rather than being kept hidden to avoid embarrassment to a school's reputation.

Five years ago the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study released its first report, bringing college binge drinking to national attention--not that it had been a well-kept secret until then. Jay Leno joked at the time, "Did it take a team of Harvard researchers to discover that college students drink?" The study did put some numbers on this behavior. Nationally, two in five students were binge drinkers, and half of these binge drinkers did so several times a week. The impact of binge drinking was not limited to the drinkers alone, but also affected others on campus through second-hand effects.

The national attention focused on students' heavy alcohol use by the report was rekindled during in the next few years with each account of a student's alcohol-related death. A spate of such tragedies occurred on college campuses throughout the country. One tragedy in particular, the death from acute alcohol poisoning of Scott Krueger at an MIT fraternity, caught the national consciousness. The fact that this could happen even at an academically elite institution meant that it could happen anywhere.

These deaths, while relatively rare considering the 8 million students enrolled in four-year colleges, are only the tip of the iceberg. For every death, emergency rooms around college campuses see many students who recover from similar misadventures. One of every nine students reports experiencing an injury related to his or her drinking.

Despite the attention colleges are giving to this problem, there has been no decrease in the level of heavy alcohol use to date. Perhaps it is too early to find a change. Perhaps the approaches colleges have undertaken so far are too limited.

Thus far, most college efforts are aimed primarily at changing student attitudes and norms. While this is an important ingredient of a comprehensive effort, it is only one step. College students did not invent binge drinking all by themselves. Half of college binge drinkers started drinking heavily in high school. They have been helped in developing and maintaining this behavior by a number of factors:

• Parents who feel that drinking is okay as long as it's not drugs, and who provide money for purchasing alcohol.

• Colleges which put tradition above common sense. (For example, one Ivy college had a traditional "streaking" day on which alcohol helped the timid act out, until the injuries outweighed the "fun." Another Ivy had a day on which students climbed a hill to revel with their six-packs.)

• Fraternities and clubs so steeped in alcohol that they have forgotten why they originally came into existence (four of five fraternity-house residents are binge drinkers).

• Ever-present bars, clubs and package stores encircling most campuses and offering lower and lower prices for larger and larger drinks. Ladies-free nights, 25-cent beer and dollar pitchers are used as marketing mechanisms.

• Returning alumni who remember and try to relive their days of "wine and roses." (College deans consider homecomings the hardest to deal with.)

Colleges must consider all of these issues, and not just focus on student norms. A lot of effort is spent persuading the binge drinkers to give up a behavior which most of them don't view as a problem. The more a student drinks, the larger the number of drinks he or she thinks it's okay to consume. The measures the College Alcohol study uses to define binge drinking--five drinks in a row for men and four for women--are scoffed at by binge drinkers: "What's five drinks, I can drink ten and still function?"

This reaction of the frequent binge drinker is shared by the International Center for Alcohol Policies, which describes itself as "supported by eleven international beverage alcohol companies." A report of this center refers to a ten-drink measure of dangerous drinking in contrast to our five-drink measure. That's one way to drastically reduce the size of the college alcohol problem: define it out of existence.

Harvard's College Alcohol Study has used the five/four drink measure because students who drink those amounts account for almost all of the alcohol problems on campus. Those who binge drink more than once a week account for only one-fifth of all college students, but consume two-thirds of all the alcohol that college students drink, an average of 14 drinks per week. They also have more than half of all the alcohol related problems on campus. At campuses where more than half of the students are binge drinkers, non-bingers are twice as likely to experience second-hand effects such as assaults, unwanted sexual advances, noise and interruptions of study time.

Making students aware that they are entitled to campus life free from these second-hand effects is necessary to enlist their support in any effort to decrease binge drinking.

The national advertising campaign of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges offers some hope, because for the first time colleges are reaching out to enlist help from those outside their campus: parents, civic leaders and the general public. The support of these groups is a must if the effort is to succeed.

Henry Wechsler is a Lecturer on Social Psychology in the Faculty of Public Health.