Twelve Loko. That’s what people used to call my friend Jack after he had consumed three “Four Lokos,” the now-restricted beverage that once contained both alcohol and energy drink levels of caffeine. Jack got drunk and endured frequent, brutal hangovers, but he suffered no severe consequences. He graduated with decent grades and works at a law firm. He navigated the maelstrom of college drinking life the way most students do: by experimenting with boundaries.
This approach has become common among college students trying to cope with the pressures and problems of alcohol intake. But our society has a deeper problem with its approach to alcohol, and the college environment is a mere symptom. Fostering a healthier college alcohol environment requires changes in federal and state policy; broader and better alcohol education from family and colleges; and ultimately, a belief in individual responsibility.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines binge drinking as “a pattern of drinking that brings a person’s blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to .08 grams percent or above.” Other definitions of binge drinking call it five drinks in one setting. Most college students don’t bother to define it at all.
Alcohol poses a serious danger when misused. NIAAA researchers found that in 2005, 1,825 college students between 18 and 24 died due to alcohol-related injuries. The same study concluded that 97,000 students of the same age range were victims of alcohol-related sexual assault, and that more than 100,000 college students had been too intoxicated to know if they were consenting to sex. These staggering statistics indicate that college students are suffering immeasurable consequences from abusing alcohol. But the solutions may be counterintuitive, involving more freedom and more openness about alcohol and its effects.
Reopening the debate about the legal drinking age would help. Currently, a state must impose a 21-year-old drinking age if it wishes to receive 10 percent of its allocated federal funding for highways. No state has ever declined the highway funding to seek a lower drinking age, not even tiny Delaware. The federal government should end this hostage-taking technique. The U.S. is a pluralistic society tolerant enough to handle unique drinking standards should its residents decide it important. Few remember fondly the era during which Jimmy Carter signed legislation mandating the highway speed limit be 55 miles per hour for a state to receive highway funding. The drinking age requirement is also an invasive federal dictate, except much more entrenched in society.
Even if states were empowered to lower the drinking age, perhaps none would. Lowering the drinking age polls poorly among voters; Gallup found 77 percent of respondents opposed lowering the drinking age in a 2007 poll. The politician to push for this policy prescription would likely have the favorability ratings of the Ebola virus (or Congress).
But its politically inexpediency doesn’t render it a bad idea. Harvard University Economist Jeffrey A. Miron found in a 2009 study that raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 didn’t lower alcohol-related traffic fatalities, but instead shifted them from those 18-20 to those 21-24. In driving, experience emerges a much more reliable determinant than age. If students understand alcohol and its effects sooner and better, they will behave more prudently. Furthermore, seat belt lives and zero-tolerance policies for drunk driving have achieved considerable gains in saving lives.
The drinking age remains a long-term solution worth considering. A state wouldn’t have to make the drinking age 18 tomorrow to lower it. To prevent social shock, a state could lower the age to 20 for five years and then to 19. There are myriad ways a state could handle new drinking age laws, and each state could consider its individual needs.
But “21” isn’t the only magic number posing a problem. The legal driving limit of .08 BAC requires clarification. It is a measure so arbitrary only the government could come up with it. Some college women aren’t incapacitated at .08 BAC, and other men have lost considerable cognizant ability before it. Before driving, intoxicated students wonder if they could pass a Breathalyzer test, not if they can operate a vehicle safely.
The problem exists because federal and state governments have given students this standard without any mechanism with which to discover if they have reached it. College students have only a foggy idea if they’re at .07 or .09 until a cop shows them the indicator on the test, and by then serious legal consequences are forthcoming. There are iPhone apps that help you calculate BAC, if you remember exact time of intake, the percent alcohol, and how to do calculus-level derivatives.
If the U.S. insists on using BAC as the standard for safe drinking, then it should educate its citizens by making this technology available widely. Students at parties are frequently faced with a terrible judgment call: does my friend need to go to the hospital? Is this alcohol poisoning? Right now they only have murky signs to evaluate when deciding. If the BAC metric is as useful as claimed, college students deserve to have access to this data.
So why not install breathalyzers in every vehicle, as Mothers Against Drunk Driving supports? Because you can only educate, not legislate to combat this problem. The goal should be to make students more aware of the effects of alcohol and its proper usage, not to ban a glass of cheap champagne to celebrate an “A” on a midterm. The United States saw the consequences of a well-intended ban on alcohol with prohibition and its eventual repeal. If we take hatchets to bar windows, students will find a more dangerous alternative. If we ban Four Lokos, students will mix Red Bull and vodka. I’ve visited “dry campuses” where alcohol and drug intake problems run rampant, and large, secular campuses where students seem to have their liquor under control.
Policy changes alone can’t combat college binge drinking. Our society offers abysmal alcohol education. For an illustration of the problem with the federal government’s approach to ending binge drinking, check out its own education website run by the NIAAA called “CollegeDrinkingPrevention.Gov.” Was FunPolice.Gov already taken?
The homepage reads “College Drinking – Changing the Culture,” but the website does precisely the opposite. Instead of discussing how to drink responsibly and understand alcohol as a social tool to use in moderation, it reinforces the cultural attitude that drinking is scary and bad. This approach to alcohol education has failed to temper campus binge drinking, but the NIAA and related organizations have doubled-down on it. On this website, you can play an interactive game traveling through your body a la The Magic School Bus or send a “powerful and to the point” E-Card to someone you know who struggles with drinking.
Surely technology has not developed this rapidly so that we can have a national conversation about drinking via E-Card. Alcohol education must begin in communities and in families. In college, it seems some of the most frequent binge drinkers are the students whose parents treated alcohol as a banned substance. Never experiencing it before college, these students go crazy with their newfound freedom. Parents need to help their children transition into adulthood, and realistic alcohol education should be part of that teaching.
And the education can’t end there. Part of the purpose of higher education is for young adults to learn how to rise to self-government, and a college as an institution should strive to cultivate individuals who can participate in our republic. This means college administrations will have to act both in mercy and in justice, encouraging moderation and setting strict boundaries. Moderation might be more prevalent if drinking weren’t relegated to dark fraternity basements.
Some students will still abuse the freedom. Human nature remains incorrigible. But there is something mystical and powerful about expanding accountability, about becoming an adult. We cannot force students to rise to their potential, but we can demonstrate as a society the beauty of being a well-ordered and healthy adult. We can show them there is a higher, better way to have fun than getting Twelve Loko.
