A Toast to Binge Drinking

Second semester is less than a month old, but fair Harvard already has my classmates in harness, and she's laying on the whip. The fleeting pleasures of intersession have been forgotten, and from Pfoho to Dunster everyone is diligently plowing ahead toward midterms and beyond. Not a moment can be wasted, not when there are job applications to fill out, interviews to undergo, labs to perform, papers to write and never ever enough time for all of it.

But me? Honestly, I'm pretty relaxed. Sure, I've got the usual assortment of academic burdens and summer job stresses, and sometimes the weight of the world does seem to be pressing rather heavily on my spindly Anglo-Saxon shoulders. But no matter what happens, I've always got something to put a spring in my step. You see, I'm a binge drinker.

Isn't that a great term? Say it with me--biiiinge drinnnnnker. Doesn't it just roll off your tongue, conjuring up images of parties where the walls ooze alcohol, where keg beer flows like a Niagara down the stairs, where Bluto and Flounder and all the rest of the Animal House gang hold court? Frankly, doesn't it just scream debauchery?

Now I'll be honest: When it comes to carousing and suckling at the teat of demon rum, I always imagined myself to be, well, a bit of a lightweight. Did I enjoy a nip of Jack Daniels, a snifter of sherry or a tall glass of Spaten from time to time? Sure. But did I binge drink? Surely not. Surely that was reserved for the hardier types, the Spee-men and Sigma Chi brothers, the strapping rowers and the bosomy Grille girls.

But then, in the pages of The Crimson, I read with mounting amazement that one can qualify as a "binge drinker" if one has, not eight or 18 or 28, but a scant five drinks in a single night. Forty-six percent of Harvard students, the study reported, make the cut--myself included. And 12 percent have the temerity to binge drink frequently--more than twice every two weeks, if you can imagine.

The whole alarmist business, from the study itself and the concerned murmurs of administrators and cops to the posturing of the beer-baiters at the Harvard School of Public Health, is just brimming with puritanical zeal. Forty-six percent, we are told, in hushed tones, like passers-by at a funeral. How terrible--these kids are just out of control--whatever can we do?

The puritans are quite right, of course. It is terrible that 46 percent of Harvardians "binge drink," and that 12 percent do so relatively often. It's just awful--because it means that 54 percent of Harvard students seldom drink at all.

This, I have decided while watching my overburdened classmates straggle through what are supposed to be the best years of their lives, is the problem with life here in lovely, chilly Cantabridgia. There isn't enough drinking--not nearly enough! Alcohol is expensive, parties are lame and everyone has a paper due the next day and a resume to pad. No one has the time to enjoy the simpler pleasures in life: the rich, loamy taste of a Guinness pint, the bubbly bite of a gin and tonic, the subtle musk of a fine merlot. Put bluntly, no one has time to just chill out and have a drink.

If only we did! If only my lovelorn, career-driven, diverser-than-diverse collection of classmates could stop worrying for a few moments, could let the paper and the interview and yes, the nicely-inflated GPA slide, and join me in some old-fashioned wassailing! I would submit, ever so humbly, that no Harvard student can claim to have lived, really and truly, until he has staggered drunkenly down Mt. Auburn Street singing Disney songs at the top of his voice, hurling snowballs through an open window in the Fly and bemoaning the girls (or guys) who got away. The Harvardian who has never been drunk, who has been too delicate, sensitive and yes, too scared to kneel before King Bacchus--well, I wish him the best, but he has just plain missed out.

Now I know (lest the howls of outrage rise) that some people cannot, and should not, imbibe alcohol. People with alcoholism in the family, devout Baptists and pious Muslims, diabetics and schizophrenics and several of my more, um, belligerent friends--for these folks and others, my solution to the Harvard blues is out of bounds. And of course, of course it isn't a good idea to be a blithering idiot and drink yourself into a stupor and end up at UHS, any more than it's a good idea to go skinny-dipping in shark-infested waters or eat those 49-cent McDonalds cheeseburgers until you vomit.

But as for the other "negative consequences" of "binge drinking," like missed classes and late papers and hangovers at interviews--I say, bring them on! Most Harvard students could stand to foul up a paper or two or nurse a migraine during that all-important, life-or-death, this-is-my-future-we're-talking-about-here face-off with the guy from Salomon Smith Barney. It might give them a little perspective.

So this weekend, if your control-freak Harvard brain tells you to stay in, pump up the Simon and Garfunkel mp3s and study for that wicked chem midterm that's coming up, tell your brain to go stuff it and come on down to the Grille. They barely card you there, I hear--and the first round's on me.

Ross G. Douthat '02 is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.