The Evils of Prohibition

With the first flurries of November come The Game, and with the game comes Harvard’s new and ingenious ways to stop people from doing any drinking. From what I understand this year, I am now expected to wait in line to get access to a miniscule number of Undergraduate Council-approved kegs served in the bog of the stadium parking lot like some kind of alcoholic refugee. Hooray. Not unlike a large number of students last year, or this year, I’ll probably take things into my own hands and bring a hip flask rather than wait half an hour for a plastic cup of headless Milwaukee’s Best.

If it weren’t for the 41 percent annualized increase in admissions to Stillman Infirmary for alcohol poisoning over the period, Harvard’s policy of minimizing its own liability would be almost amusing. It would be just another campy game of cat and mouse between a certain “Animal House” portion of the student body and a puritanical administration. No one would get hurt, there would be no downside and the controversy over the demon drink would have no bearing on the realities of student safety or wellbeing.

Unfortunately, nothing ever changes. Each and every year a new class of first-years arrives and makes up 55 percent of Stillman Infirmary admissions in the month of September and gradually learns how to pace themselves, statistically speaking, by the start of December. Not that people become sensible drinkers by any means—by the end of last year, 3.7 percent of the class of 2007 had got so intoxicated that they needed to be sent to hospital. Those in other classes shouldn’t laugh—one percent of the upperclass students that year got their stomachs pumped, too. People get hospitalized at The Game and sexually assaulted in room parties thanks to alcohol. According to Heather Wilson at the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, alcohol is involved in cases of alleged sexual assault 90 percent of the time, and often has a great deal to do with why criminal facts of these cases are hard to find. It would be hard not to draw lines between Harvard’s drinking problem and sexual assault on campus.

Harvard’s “war on booze” has been as effective as the “war on drugs.” Instead of reducing serious and dangerous drinking on campus, it seems to have increased the incidence of it by making alcohol all the more alluring. What seems to be borne out by the numbers from UHS and anecdotal evidence is that we have more drinking on campus done by less people. Harvard has been singularly effective in cracking down on responsible, social drinking and has utterly failed to reduce the amount of irresponsible binge drinking.

To be fair to the Harvard administration, Massachusetts state law does not make it easy to engender a more responsible, mature culture of alcohol use. The state is all too ready to clamp down on universities that do not make every effort to stop students drinking and provides ample precedent for students to sue universities for their own idiocy in alcohol consumption.

The problem for Harvard is that, though it may have protected itself from litigation, it has done little for student welfare. Students still arrive at this school without having ever escaped parental control and proceed to go crazy in quite self-destructive ways. Coming from a country (Australia) where the drinking age is 18, this is quite bizarre for me—generally people have worked out that drinking until you’re sick is not fun by the age of eighteen and do not associate binge drinking with tertiary education. The behavior of people arriving at Harvard can generally be explained by a combination of a lack of experience and a lack of role models: there is a paucity of responsible adult drinkers to party with, since anyone over 21 quickly migrates to Cambridge bars and clubs. As such, most underage students have to work things out for themselves, especially as education programs on drinking at Harvard consist of little more than telling people that, yes, it is illegal to drink under the age of 21 and that you will be ad boarded if caught doing so.

It would be far too much to ask Harvard to have an open bar during Freshman Week. Official student groups are welcome to throw parties in downtown Boston with bars, so there’s no reason the drinking can’t happen at on-campus parties. Not only might Harvard be better able to identify and help those who are severely intoxicated, but it might help to create a more mature and moderate drinking culture in a state and legal framework that makes it extremely difficult to do so. Harvard could quite easily continue to turn a blind eye to drinking problems on campus, but with a new record for hospital admissions being broken each year, and Harvard being on track to a record number of sexual assaults, the University really must ask itself whether it can really be so narrow minded in defining its responsibilities.

Alex Turnbull ‘05 is an economics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.