The Five-Year Party (15 page)
Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
“That is idiocy,” said Dee Owens, president of the Indiana Coalition to Reduce Underage Drinking, of the students who drink to pass out. “That is not drinking. That is not socially interacting and having fun.” She said she has increasingly seen students who had blood alcohol levels of two or even three times the legal limit, which can cause brain damage and even death.
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The binge drinking that takes place at party schools is as different from social drinking as a shoving match is from a nuclear attack. Binge drinking is defined as five or more drinks in a row for men and four or more drinks in a row for women. In a survey of students at 119 American colleges, Harvard University found that 44 percent of American college students had engaged in binge drinking during the two weeks before the survey. The figures were higher for men (51 percent) than women (40 percent). These statistics were for all kinds of colleges around the country, including many non-party colleges where education is taken seriously. At the kind of party schools described in this book, binge drinkers are a solid majority. The typical binge drinker was white, middle class, age twenty-three or younger, and a member of a fraternity or sorority. If they were binge drinkers in high school, according to the survey, they were three times more likely to be binge drinkers in college.
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But beyond regular binge drinkers, there is a more serious group called the super binge drinkers, who became intoxicated three or more times in a two-week period. Over half of the binge drinkers, or about 23 percent of all college students, fell into this category.
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But beyond regular binge drinkers, there is a more serious group called the super binge drinkers, who became intoxicated three or more times in a two-week period. Over half of the binge drinkers, or about 23 percent of all college students, fell into this category.
The collegiate culture of drinking seems to be moving from keg parties to industrial-strength guzzling, with a full third of our nation’s colleges and universities qualifying as high binge drinking campuses where more than half the students indicated in surveys that they were binge drinkers. The rate was much higher among Greeks, where 86 percent of fraternity brothers and 80 percent of sorority sisters were classified as binge drinkers.
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One college ritual that is particularly deadly is the tradition of students drinking twenty-one shots of liquor on their twenty-first birthdays. This feat is basically impossible for most people to achieve without alcohol poisoning, but it doesn’t keep students from trying, often with deadly results. In October 2007, for example, Amanda Jax, a student at Minnesota State, died of alcohol poisoning on her twenty-first birthday while attempting to down twenty-one drinks at a bar.
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Drinking is, in fact, often an end in itself, as shown by the number of party games or beer games that students described for me. Among the most popular drinking games at my college was “Beirut,” which was also referred to as “beer pong” on other campuses. It consists of setting up red plastic sixteen-ounce plastic cups on both ends of a table and throwing ping-pong balls so that they land inside the cups on the other side. When a ball lands in a cup, the defending team must drink the beer in that cup.
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While some colleges have attempted to ban the game, most party school administrators simply look the other way. They know that it is being played but do little to stop it, even when it is played on campus, often as part of leagues and championships, the results of which are posted on dormitory walls. At my college, special ping-pong balls with the college logo were sold in the campus store right next to the college-imprinted shot glasses and beer mugs. When I asked one of the clerks why the ping-pong balls were displayed next to the shot glasses, she explained to me that the balls were used for a drinking game and were never meant to be used on a ping-pong table. So although the college’s official policy is to discourage binge drinking, administrators can’t resist the temptation to profit from it when they get a chance.
In the summer of 2005, the Anheuser-Busch Companies, the brewers of Budweiser and Bud Light, two of the most popular beers among college students, began marketing “Bud Pong” kits through beer distributors. The company, which has an official policy of discouraging binge drinking and drinking by minors, set up promotions in college bars using special beer pong cups and table covers .
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When the
New York Times
caught wind of this, it contacted Francine Katz, vice president for communications and consumer affairs for Anheuser-Busch, and asked why the company was violating its policies by encouraging underage drinking and binge drinking. Katz said she wasn’t aware that students were using the game to drink beer. The game, she said, was designed to be used with water and not beer!
New York Times
caught wind of this, it contacted Francine Katz, vice president for communications and consumer affairs for Anheuser-Busch, and asked why the company was violating its policies by encouraging underage drinking and binge drinking. Katz said she wasn’t aware that students were using the game to drink beer. The game, she said, was designed to be used with water and not beer!
The
Times
then followed up by asking college-town bar owners across the country what liquid had been used to fill the cups. A bar-tender near Clemson University said she had worked at a number of Bud Pong events and never saw a game where the cups were filled with water. Henry Wechsler, director of the College Alcohol Study at the Harvard School of Public Health, questioned why a company that sold alcohol would promote games that involve drinking water. “It’s preposterous,” he told the
Times.
Times
then followed up by asking college-town bar owners across the country what liquid had been used to fill the cups. A bar-tender near Clemson University said she had worked at a number of Bud Pong events and never saw a game where the cups were filled with water. Henry Wechsler, director of the College Alcohol Study at the Harvard School of Public Health, questioned why a company that sold alcohol would promote games that involve drinking water. “It’s preposterous,” he told the
Times.
Just three days after the
Times
story appeared, Anheuser-Busch announced that it was withdrawing its support for Bud Pong. “Despite our explicit guidelines,” Katz said, “there may have been instances where this promotion was not carried out in the manner it was intended.”
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Times
story appeared, Anheuser-Busch announced that it was withdrawing its support for Bud Pong. “Despite our explicit guidelines,” Katz said, “there may have been instances where this promotion was not carried out in the manner it was intended.”
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Despite their official policies of discouraging binge drinking, the sales departments of brewing and distilling companies have been working closely with college administrators to target college students as the next generation of customers. Sports stadiums and auditoriums used for rock concert halls, for example, are full of advertising for alcohol with money flowing from the brewers directly into college treasuries. A reporter for the student newspaper at Berkeley charged that she and her fellow students were being deliberately targeted through their colleges by big alcohol.
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Another popular pastime is making Jell-O shots, in which vodka or some other form of hard alcohol is substituted for the water in making regular Jell-O. The finished product tastes like flavored gelatin with barely a trace of alcohol taste. This makes it popular with inexperienced drinkers who down several of them in a few minutes and quickly become intoxicated. Dozens of websites are dedicated to recipes for making them.
A student can drink two cans of beer in only two seconds using the drinking funnel or a similar apparatus made out of a plastic gasoline can. The liquid is ingested continuously rather than sipping as one would do if drinking normally. When there is no funnel around, students can achieve some of the same speed of consumption by a process called “shotgunning.” This involves punching a hole in the side of a beer can with a knife. The drinker then places his lips to the hole, tilts the can right side up and pops the top. This causes the beer to be forced through the hole quickly. The entire contents of the can empty into the student’s mouth in five seconds or less.
Unconscious students are so common on party school campuses that students have a name for them: furniture. Some thoughtful students use what’s called the “Bacchus maneuver” (after the Greek god of wine) to turn unconscious students onto their sides to prevent them from suffocating on their own vomit. Some less thoughtful students use permanent markers to write messages on the unconscious student’s skin.
In many college towns, requests to take unconscious students to the hospital make up over half of the city’s total number of ambulance calls. At Penn State, for example, the nation’s number one party school, the number of students taken to the hospital for alcohol poisoning increased 84 percent in three years to 585.
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At the college I taught at in New Hampshire, there were so many false fire alarms and ambulance calls for drunken students that the city required the college to pay a fee to support the expensive public services consumed by all those drunken students.
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At the college I taught at in New Hampshire, there were so many false fire alarms and ambulance calls for drunken students that the city required the college to pay a fee to support the expensive public services consumed by all those drunken students.
Because most student drinking parties take place off campus and in fraternity houses, they are mostly out of the direct control of the college. The drinking that takes place on campus, although significant, is much more hidden. Students told me it was never a problem to obtain beer and liquor in any dorm on campus at any time of day or night. Most of the students I spoke with had phony ID cards that showed they were over twenty-one when they were really only nineteen. There were students with machines that could alter the birth date on your driver’s license, but most students simply acquired someone else’s license. The clerks at the store only looked at the date, not the picture. The bouncers in the local bars had drawers full of fake IDs that did not quite pass the test.
It’s difficult to control the flow of alcohol on a campus because many of the seniors are over the age limit. Seniors can buy as much beer and hard liquor as they want legally and then bring it back to the dorms or houses in the off-campus student ghetto to resell at a handsome profit. But the biggest obstacle to controlling binge drinking is that party school administrators understand that binge drinkers make up a majority of their customers and sending them packing or making them unhappy would be a very poor business decision. Binge drinkers and party schools exist in one of those symbiotic relationships that party schools find so convenient. As long as they pay their tuition, binge drinkers looking for the five-year party are welcome, but administrators have to play a careful balancing act when the antics of drunken students hit the front pages. Taking any kind of serious action against binge drinkers could change their reputation at student-run websites from
party school
to
unfriendly to drinking
and leave them with nearly empty classrooms and dormitory halls. The majority of students simply don’t want to go to a college that won’t let them drink themselves into unconsciousness, so a reputation for being unfriendly to drinking is a suicidal marketing position.
party school
to
unfriendly to drinking
and leave them with nearly empty classrooms and dormitory halls. The majority of students simply don’t want to go to a college that won’t let them drink themselves into unconsciousness, so a reputation for being unfriendly to drinking is a suicidal marketing position.
Most students see excessive drinking as a major part of the college experience. For those reasons, administrators pretend to get tough on bingers but are careful not to get tough enough to scare students away. They usually sit on their hands until parents, local residents, or the local newspaper demand that they do something. They issue press releases telling the public that they are serious about disciplining their inebriated scholars, but the students understand that this is all just smoke and mirrors and that the college isn’t really going to cancel the party.
A typical penalty for students who are arrested for alcohol violations is to send them to a college-run alcohol education program, which no one really thinks does any good, especially the students. It’s like sending Paris Hilton to rehab. My student journalists wrote articles about students who took the hour-long course and then went out and celebrated by “getting really fucked up” at a post-class bash held in their honor.
The administrators who run party schools regularly attend workshops to discuss student binge drinking and what they can do about it. What would seem to be the simplest solution—expelling binge drinkers—is not an option because it would interfere with their prime directive: retention of students. Tough punishments are out for the same reason. Instead, what college administrators seem to learn about at these conferences is how to keep the public from finding out what is going on. This works most of the time—until there is a tragedy that is too big to sweep under the rug.
In 1997, for example, Scott Krueger, a freshman at MIT, died of alcohol poisoning. During his autopsy, it was found that the amount of alcohol in his blood was five times the legal limit in Massachusetts. Since then, thousands of college students have been found dead of alcohol overdoses. Colleges inform the parents, schedule a candlelight memorial vigil, set up counseling sessions, and then try to move the story off the front pages before it can cause any more damage to college applications.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism estimated that 1,700 college students die every year as a result of alcohol abuse, including alcohol poisoning, automobile accidents, and assaults. Another six hundred thousand are injured as a result of drinking. Nearly seven hundred thousand students are assaulted by other students and four hundred thousand reported having unsafe sex while intoxicated. There are one hundred thousand sexual assaults or date rapes each year while one of the parties is intoxicated and another hundred thousand students reported that they had sexual activity but were too intoxicated to remember if they had given consent or not.
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The Institute found that 25 percent of college students reported academic consequences from drinking, including missing classes, falling behind, doing poorly on exams, and receiving lower grades.
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The Institute found that 25 percent of college students reported academic consequences from drinking, including missing classes, falling behind, doing poorly on exams, and receiving lower grades.
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The physical damage, however, may not show up until years after graduation. A recent study by the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina found that binge drinking by young people can cause brain damage that persists far into the adult years, long after the binge drinking has stopped. After they stopped drinking and became sober, adult rats in this study could still learn, but they could not relearn information. Normal rats that had learned to find food in a particular place could easily go to a new spot when the food was moved. But rats that had been given excessive amounts of alcohol in their youth kept returning to the place where the food had been and were unable to find food in a different location. This damage affected adolescents more than adults and resulted in diminished control over cravings for alcohol and poor decision-making. Normal adolescent brains were programmed for accelerated learning and how to make decisions when faced with ambiguity, but when large doses of alcohol were added, this accelerated learning did not take place.
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