Posted on 08/23/2005 4:43:43 PM PDT by RWR8189
In the coming weeks, millions of students will begin their fall semester of college, with all the attendant rituals of campus life: freshman orientation, registering for classes, rushing by fraternities and sororities and, in a more recent nocturnal college tradition, "pregaming" in their rooms.
Pregaming is probably unfamiliar to people who went to college before the 1990s. But it is now a common practice among 18-, 19- and 20-year-old students who cannot legally buy or consume alcohol. It usually involves sitting in a dorm room or an off-campus apartment and drinking as much hard liquor as possible before heading out for the evening's parties. While reporting for my book Binge, I witnessed the hospitalization of several students for acute alcohol poisoning. Among them was a Hamilton College freshman who had consumed 22 shots of vodka while sitting in a dorm room with her friends. Such hospitalizations are routine on campuses across the nation. By the Thanksgiving break of the year I visited Harvard, the university's health center had admitted nearly 70 students for alcohol poisoning.
When students are hospitalized--or worse yet, die from alcohol poisoning, which happens about 300 times each year--college presidents tend to react by declaring their campuses dry or shutting down fraternity houses. But tighter enforcement of the minimum drinking age of 21 is not the solution. It's part of the problem.
Over the past 40 years, the U.S. has taken a confusing approach to the age-appropriateness of various rights, privileges and behaviors. It used to be that 21 was the age that legally defined adulthood. On the heels of the student revolution of the late '60s, however, came sweeping changes: the voting age was reduced to 18; privacy laws were enacted that protected college students' academic, health and disciplinary records from outsiders, including parents; and the drinking age, which had varied from state to state, was lowered to 18.
Then, thanks in large measure to intense lobbying by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Congress in 1984 effectively blackmailed states into hiking the minimum drinking age to 21 by passing a law that tied compliance to the distribution of federal-aid highway funds--an amount that will average $690 million per state this year. There is no doubt that the law, which achieved full 50-state compliance in 1988, saved lives, but it had the unintended consequence of creating a covert culture around alcohol as the young adult's forbidden fruit.
Drinking has been an aspect of college life since the first Western universities in the 14th century. My friends and I drank in college in the 1960s--sometimes a lot but not so much that we had to be hospitalized. Veteran college administrators cite a sea change in campus culture that began, not without coincidence, in the 1990s. It was marked by a shift from beer to hard liquor, consumed not in large social settings, since that is now illegal, but furtively and dangerously in students' residences.
In my reporting at colleges around the country, I did not meet any presidents or deans who felt that the 21-year age minimum helps their efforts to curb the abuse of alcohol on their campuses. Quite the opposite. They thought the law impeded their efforts since it takes away the ability to monitor and supervise drinking activity.
What would happen if the drinking age was rolled back to 18 or 19? Initially, there would be a surge in binge drinking as young adults savored their newfound freedom. But over time, I predict, U.S. college students would settle into the saner approach to alcohol I saw on the one campus I visited where the legal drinking age is 18: Montreal's McGill University, which enrolls about 2,000 American undergraduates a year. Many, when they first arrive, go overboard, exploiting their ability to drink legally. But by midterms, when McGill's demanding academic standards must be met, the vast majority have put drinking into its practical place among their priorities.
A culture like that is achievable at U.S. colleges if Congress can muster the fortitude to reverse a bad policy. If lawmakers want to reduce drunk driving, they should do what the Norwegians do: throw the book at offenders no matter what their age. Meanwhile, we should let the pregamers come out of their dorm rooms so that they can learn to handle alcohol like the adults we hope and expect them to be.
Barrett Seaman, a former TIME editor and correspondent, is the author of Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You
If the government believes you are responsible enough to fight and possibly die for your country, then you should be old enough to enjoy a cold beer when you get home.
I have not heard any valid argument refuting this.
New college sport????
Should have seen my dorm back in the 70s.
I am not saying it's right but college kids have always been boozers.
so wait...college students didn't drink underage before the 90's?
:)
I know I know....
My problem is the definition of bingeing. In my heyday, it took a six pack before I felt buzzed.
I get the feeling that bingeing has been a tradition as long as there have been colleges.
How about a graduated drinking age: 16 in a licenced establishment accompanied by a parent, guardian or other responsible adult; 18 for all drinkers?
This is news. When I was at U.N.H. this was every Friday and Saturday night. I wont even go into the absolute druken stupor I maintained every weekend through my Med school years into downtown Boston.
I guess facts never get a place in your posts.
Mid 80s more likely....Did this all the time!
>>>>Pregaming is probably unfamiliar to people who went to college before the 1990s.
I'm sure a talented friend could post a pic or two to illustrate the point.
Precisely. There's nothing new to this.
Fred Flintstone used to warm-up before heading out from Bedrock U.....
I take it none of these reporters, who write about this crap every year, ever drank in college. They make it sound like something new. I drank in college and so did my father and his brother. I did it in epic proportions and now it would be called binge drinking. I graduated fifteen years ago before this became newsworthy.
Folks like that can always graduate with a degree in "Gender studies".
This is shocking! Shocking, I say! What is the collegiate world coming to!!
Never before in history would young people have ever considered this. Never!
Oh, the humanity!!
Maybe you can offer me a better explanation.
If a young man is old enough to fight and die serving his country, why is he too young to enjoy a beer?
New?
So where was the author during Animal House?
I have a vague memory of putting a fifth of vodka into a gallon of orange juice and passing it among friends on the way to the game...in 1987.
NEW????
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