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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
A new study shows that college binge drinkers, now with more women in their ranks, wreak havoc on campus. Harvard researcher Henry Wechsler charts the damage.
Apr 12, 2002 | The study on college drinking released this week by the National Institute of Health's National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) is a killer. More specifically, it is about killers. And rapists and bullies. It is about kids who binge on alcohol -- the 44 percent who drink 70 percent of all alcohol consumed by students -- and the people they become when they are drunk.
According to the report, entitled "A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges," four college students die in accidents related to alcohol each day; more than 1,000 sustain injuries tied to alcohol use; and approximately 192 are sexually assaulted, or raped -- usually by dates -- after drinking. Included in the study was the observation that "students who drink the most include: First-year students (during the first weeks of arrival), Males, Whites, Members of fraternities and sororities, [and] athletes."
This comes as no surprise to me. Nor does the revelation that most college students drink moderately or not at all. In my experience as a student at an Ivy League university, the horror of binge drinking as well as the civility of moderate tippling were familiar -- and accepted with little fear or fanfare.
During my Freshman Week, a time, according to the NIAAA study, when students typically gorge on drink, a fellow student told me that she had passed out after drinking enormous amounts of beer and had been raped by a group of drunk athletes.
Meanwhile, at the very same college, despite a state drinking age of 21, we went to "sherries" on Friday nights before dinner. There we would sip a couple of thimblefuls of sherry with classmates and professors, practicing, as tradition allowed, the art of civilized drinking and socializing. This is where many of us learned how to drink -- with food and moderately. Other students' experiences were very different -- one house hosted 100-plus guests for beer at their "sherries," and the kids used them as springboards for the weekend buzz. But lines were drawn, and most of us -- then and now -- shunned the toga and attendant brutality.
This week's report was meant to sound the alarm on college binge drinking, and there is little doubt that schools that have not adopted a zero-tolerance policy will be inspired to join the crowd. It is the beginning of a solution, but not the answer. Campus bans on alcohol control some damage due to drinking, but they also drive it underground. According to a study by Henry Wechsler, director of the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Studies Program, "among drinkers, students at ban schools engaged in as much extreme drinking as drinkers at schools that do not ban alcohol, and experienced the same rate of alcohol-related problems."
Wechsler has studied college alcohol use for the past three decades; his national studies, published in 1993, 1997, 1999 and 2001, formed the background for the NIAAA study. He agreed to elaborate on his findings, and those of his NIAAA colleagues, in an interview from his office at Harvard's School of Public Health.
Are college students drinking more today than they have in the past?
College drinking has been high and stayed high for a long time. The percentage of student drinkers has gone up significantly because young women at college now drink nearly as much as men. Back in 1950, a study was done on college drinking, and the percentage of heavy drinkers was slightly lower among men, compared to today, but much, much lower among women.
While I've been studying college drinking in smaller contexts for 30 years, my national studies on college drinking began 10 years ago. In those 10 years, while the percentage of abstainers has gone up 18 percent, the binge drinking (five drinks in a row for men, four in a row for women) has remained steady at 44 percent. But the percentage of frequent heavy drinkers has gone up 16 percent. Significantly, the frequent binge drinkers account for 72 percent of the alcohol consumed by college students. College drinking has become polarized.
