Posted on 08/30/2011 2:50:21 PM PDT by flowerplough
Q:Usually when people talk about college binge drinking they use terms like, "epidemic" or "plague." But you don't write about it in such a negative way. Why?
A:The history of alcohol research is the history of pathology. There's a lot of focus on addiction, and the ways in which alcohol destroys lives and destroys families, and in [the] college drinking world in particular, there are these long lists and inventories of all its harms. That's important because some bad things do happen, but what past researchers have missed is why it's fun. I asked that question of my informants, and I could tell it was the first time that anybody asked them that -- "Did you have fun?" "Yeah, of course I had fun." OK, so, what was fun about it? What are the payoffs? ...
Q:College has been associated with binge drinking for a very long time, especially if you think about its portrayals in popular culture. Where does this come from?
A:There's been this social construction of college as a place for heavy drinking, partly thanks to Hollywood depictions. I grew up in the '70s and our major exposure to college was "Animal House" and movies that were all about getting hammered. And then a lot of us are introduced to college through siblings and parents, and people who go to college have a ton of stories about drinking.
But a lot of it has to do with the structural position that these young people are in. They're 18- to 22-year-olds. They're away from the supervision of their parents, many of them for the first time, and that's an important time in life to search for identity. And for my informants alcohol was a vehicle for hooking up and meeting people and having romantic and sexual interactions...
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
sure, make an example
enforce the law, what is it for?
No wonder we let illegals in, the law doesn’t matter
can we ignore laws on murder and rape too? well, if they’re drunk in college we do I guess.
I’m of two minds about drinking to excess. The first is of the wry observation that “If it were not for alcohol, the human species would have long ago died out.”
But, more practically speaking, it is vital to keep people under the age of about 21 away from addictive substances of all kinds. This is because, until that age, the brain is not fully grown, and can be altered by the introduction of addictive substances to both be more susceptible to addiction, and to be less able to break out of addiction.
After the age of around 21, it is much harder to become addicted, and even if you do, it is much easier to break that addiction.
Alcohol is particularly bad, because it can cause damage throughout the body, in the short, medium, and long term. It can also exacerbate other medical conditions and contribute to mental illness.
Because it prepares them to be great leaders like their socialist, bipartisan parents.
The campus cops and city policemen do nothing but look for drunk students in order to ticket them and make money for lawyers and headaches for students and parents. My friend’s daughter got arrested while walking around intoxicated at UGA. Someone’s making a fortune off the drinking age being 21.
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