Article published November 09, 2009
Young adult binge drinking nothing to slough off
LIVING in a college town, I see the best and occasionally the worst of student behavior.
I watch in admiration as they dance for 32 hours straight to raise money for charity. I cheer them on as they undertake an annual blood drive. I marvel at the achievements of the most motivated among them in classrooms and laboratories.
But I shudder when I drive by a rented house where a drinking party has spilled on to the lawn and young adults freed from parental influence demonstrate just how little regard they have for the responsibilities that come with independence.
In Bowling Green, some of these gatherings are so legendary they've even acquired names. Frazee Frenzy and Merry Madness are the alliterative names given to two of them, based on the streets where they have occurred so often in the past.
But I am not picking on Bowling Green State University. If this were only BGSU's problem or the City of Bowling Green's problem, there would be no need for the hand-wringing to extend beyond the city limits. But the sad truth is that alcohol abuse by young people 18 to 24 is a crisis across the land, and not just at our universities.
However, it is on college campuses that the problem seems concentrated, if for no other reason than that is where 18 to 24-year-olds hang out in the greatest numbers.The University of Toledo and its nearby neighborhood have had their own problems with student drinking parties that get out of hand.
So it's hardly surprising that student drinking is a source of tension on most campuses in communities where "town and gown" issues are never far away.
Bowling Green has an added reason to worry - a busy railroad track runs through it, neatly separating the students and their dormitories, fraternities, and apartments from the downtown and the bars of Main Street.
When an intoxicated student heads back to campus after a night of boozing and tries to beat a train, the result is usually tragic.
It's time to stop glorifying drunken behavior.
It's time to stop printing T-shirts proudly listing the watering holes visited on escapades almost poetically described as "pub crawls."
It's time to understand that binge drinking can be fatal.
It's time for redwatchband.org.
The Red Watch Band program was launched last March at Stony Brook State University of New York on Long Island after a faculty member's son, a young freshman at Northwestern University, died of acute alcohol intoxication.
Her son's friends did nothing to help him after he passed out, figuring he'd sleep it off and wake up the next day. But with a blood-alcohol content at a lethal level of 0.39, he never had a chance.
The president of the university wanted Stony Brook to address the problem, and the Red Watch Band movement was born.
Working with health-care professionals, Stony Brook students and officials at the university's Center for Prevention and Outreach developed techniques for dealing with alcohol emergencies.
They learned, and then taught others, the swift action that must be taken to rescue a passed-out student from a drinking death.
Because every second counts, each student completing the course receives a red watch, identifying him or her as a potential rescuer.
Stony Brook's program would only help Stony Brook if it went no further. But since its launch last spring, 32 other colleges have signed on.
Unfortunately, only one of them, Wilmington College, is in Ohio. No other Ohio private schools and none of our public universities is yet involved.
Kenyon College and some other schools take part in a program called the Amethyst Initiative, which is more preventive in nature. That's a noble intent, but Red Watch deals with the reality that prevention is a message few are hearing.
More schools need to figure out what Stony Brook already knows. The university is making the process as simple as it can. It offers periodic "train the trainers" sessions at the Stony Brook campus.
They're free, and there is one today. But colleges can still implement the program without the expense of traveling to Long Island. A user agreement permits the training and curriculum to be administered on home campuses.
It all sounds so simple, and so right.
Collegiate binge drinking kills and injures in scary numbers. According to the Annual Review of Public Health, more than 1,700 college students 18 to 24 die each year of alcohol-related causes, and another 30,000 require medical treatment after toxic drinking.
Perhaps the most chilling number of all: the prevalence of binge drinking among all Americans 18 to 24 is 27.4 percent, according to a morbidity and mortality report last April. That's more than one in four. Peer pressure can sometimes be overwhelming.
If I still had a kid in college, I'd be very afraid.
Despite the statistics, there no doubt are those who believe this is just so much social feel-good stuff, the kind of thing they think liberals do to feel better about themselves.
But if just one son or daughter of a total stranger is spared, I don't care what the critics think. Neither does Stony Brook.
Thomas Walton is the retired Editor and Vice President of The Blade. His column appears every other Monday.
Contact him at: twalton@theblade.com
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