College Students and Binge Drinking

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Recommended: reflection on regular alcohol consumption in college

Frank's* binge drinking began on a warm fall evening in September 2002. The 18-year-old freshman had just finished moving into Northeastern's Smith Hall, a dormitory on Hemenway Street for first year students, when one of his roommates decided that it was time to start drinking.

"Out of nowhere he pulled out a huge bottle of Southern Comfort and invited a bunch of people over," said Frank. "I was excited, because my idea of coming to college was to party and have fun and meet a lot of new people."

Frank says that that night, he and his roommate and a couple other freshmen students from Smith Hall drank the entire bottle of Southern Comfort as well as a 1.75 liter bottle of vodka.

"It felt great. I was talking to a bunch of new people, socializing, having a great time, then it all caught up to me and the room started spinning. I ended up passing out in my bunk bed and sleeping straight through til the next afternoon."

Frank's story is a common one on college campuses across the country. According to the Harvard School of Public Health's College Alcohol Study, a 2001 survey found that 44.4% of college students admit to binge drinking. The study defines binge drinking as five drinks in a row for males and four in a row for women, with a drink consisting of a 12 ounce beer, a 5 ounce glass of wine, or a 1 and a half ounce shot of hard liquor. One hundred and nineteen four-year colleges in the United States were selected to participate in the study, to represent a random cross-section of male and female students enrolled in 4 year colleges.

The binge drinking rate for white males like Frank was closer to 50% meaning that approximately one out of every two white males at a college in the United States has participated in binge drinking during their undergraduate career.

The study also states that "binge drinking was often accompanied by educational difficulties, psychosocial problems, antisocial behaviors, injuries, overdoses, high-risk sexual behaviors, and other risk taking, such as alcohol impaired driving."

The natural question one might ask is why this is occurring. Dr. Henry Wechsler, the author of the HSPH College Alcohol Study, recently published a book on the topic, "Dying to Drink: Confronting Binge Drinking on College Campuses." According to Dr. Wechsler's book, "The availability

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