To curb binge drinking, college students must be empowered to change campus climate by James McIntosh Despite efforts by colleges to ban alcohol or educate students about the dangers or abusive drinking, the recently released College Alcohol Study by the Harvard School of Public Health shows that 2 out of 5 students in 1997 could be considered binge drinkers, a level just slightly lower than four years earlier. I am not surprised. Even my brightest students succumb. Once, right after my lecture on blood alcohol levels, a female pre-med student missed an exam. Several days later, she came to my office and explained that she had been hospitalized in a coma with a blood alcohol level of .37.
Students study, play and live in a world insulated from the rest of society.
They are still dependent, yet they are not yet considered adults. So they pursue with a vengeance membership in their peer group on campus. Beginning with its establishment in the early 1970s, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism called for teaching responsible drinking to college students. During the Reagan years, the country shifted from an educational to a prohibitive mode. Since then, heavy- handed policies have prevailed, based on the view that to preach responsible drinking to a group that is largely under the legal drinking age is a weak strategy.