America has a problem- well, America has a lot of problems- but this time, I’m talking about a drinking problem. Numerous stories of college students being rushed to the hospital due to binge drinking induced alcohol poisoning have surfaced over the past decade or so. Some of them end in tragedy. Many Arizona residents and state university students remember too vividly the death of eighteen year old Naomi McClendon who fell ten stories to her death after binge drinking at a frat party in 2014. The sad thing is that she isn’t the only one to have come to such an unfortunate fate. According to University of Utah Healthcare, over a thousand college students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four die, 599,000 are injured, 696,000 are assaulted, and 97,000 are sexually abused each year while under the influence of alcohol. Those are some pretty big and scary numbers, especially when considering that this all happens under the eye of educational institutions.
So What is Binge Drinking?
It’s important to understand that these statistics aren’t just talking about having a few glasses of wine with your girlfriends or getting a slight buzz off a few beers while playing a game of pool and eating pizza. These statistics are referring to those who engage in binge drinking activities at massive college parties, like games of beer pong, King’s Cup, and standing keg contests. The official Oxford definition of binge drinking is:
The consumption of an excessive amount of alcohol in a short period of time.
It Has Permanent Effects on Your Body
Those who binge drink tend to consume high amounts of alcohol in under an hour, causing serious impairments on students who are usually not accustomed to drinking so much in an instant. And that’s only the immediate factors. Many who do binge drink at college parties have only one thing on their minds: to get completely wasted, to fit in, and to have a laugh. Most of them expect the traditional hangover and nauseous state the following morning. Most young adults don’t stop to consider the fact that drinking in such a heavy fashion can result in permanent and possibly even irreversible consequences: death, car accidents that can potentially leave you paralyzed and according to new research, memory loss. They ran an experiment at Duke University and found that heavy drinking damages the very parts of the brain you use to even go to college with in the first place. They gave adolescent rats dosages of alcohol that were consistent in binge drinking behaviors and the results were crazy interesting. Website VeryWell explains the study as such:
“We are not concerned about college students who only drink one or two drinks every now and then. We are concerned about heavy drinkers.” lead author Dr. Aaron M. White said. “The alcohol dose was very high because we don’t know what is an appropriate dose, so we want to show an effect if one is present.”
“We believe that the adolescent brain is more vulnerable to the neurotoxic effects of alcohol than the adult brain,” he said. Alcohol was found to impair activity in the brain receptors responsible for memory and learning.
White goes onto explain that the issue exclusively pertains to adolescents:
“What we found was that the group that was most affected — made the most errors — was the group that had the binge pattern exposure as adolescents,” White said. “These rats had a more difficult time finding their way through a maze that they were trained to navigate.”
The study also notes that those issues with memory loss do not go away as you enter adulthood, which means that students who take in excessive amounts of liquor permanently damage that area of their brain. Why would anyone want to do that to themselves? Why pay an extreme amount of money to attend college in the first place if you’re not going to remember what you learned anyway?
So, Who’s to Blame?
It’s easy to blame this drinking problem on pop culture, where a majority of songs are about throwing em’ back and getting completely wasted for kicks. But we have to look deeper than Sia’s Chandelier and understand that colleges have a drinking culture that’s too easily accepted in society. Everyone jokes about how getting wasted in college is a right of passage and we all know that one family member who was a party animal at colleges and has “great stories.” But the reality behind the curtain is that college drinking has become more intense than it has ever been. It’s not just about kickbacks and a few shots at the bar, like your Uncle Kenny used to do in the seventies. A recent routine part of college drinking is a practice we all know from the term being popularized on social media: pregaming. Pregaming is essentially getting buzzed before attending a party, so that you’re already feeling good as you’re going out. The problem with this is that this behavior is usually followed by yet more drinking, resulting in ridiculously high blood alcohol content levels and causing a formula for alcohol poisoning.
One of the most obvious reasons drinking is so ingrained into college culture is that students simply want to fit in, whether it’s to make friends, get into a fraternity or sorority, or to hookup. It’s a widely known social practice on the college scene. If you want to be known and have a circle of friends, you go to a party and you drink until you can’t see straight. It’s not as simple as being influenced by pop stars or even being pressured by your peers. This problem seeps deep into the pockets of ancient college rituals. The problems comes from college as being seen as the prime time to drink and lose your mind at parties. The way we approach the college life in America is strange to me. Instead of making lists of colleges who produce the most successful students, we make them about the top party schools in the country. We make threads on twitter about how to drink inconspicuously on campus and what the most effective ways of getting plastered are instead of making them about useful study tips or forming healthy habits while away from home.
Instead of Turning Up, We Should Be Trying To Turn Down the Culture of Binge Drinking
If, as college students and potential college students, we want to make a change in the devastating statistics, we need to start with ourselves. As young adults, we don’t have much control over our surroundings. Being taken seriously for our political and environmental standpoints is a challenge and we know it’s going to take years to change the culture we have been born into. However, I do believe that we can exercise complete control over the binge drinking culture in colleges across the country because it is a culture we have helped create ourselves. It isn’t about saying no to a a few drinks at a party. It’s not about becoming straight-edge and completely refusing alcohol altogether (but it’s fine if you want to do that, too!) It’s about understanding that there are limits and boundaries and precautions we have to take into consideration when it comes to alcohol consumption. Being aware and becoming educated about the risks associated with heavy drinking is of critical importance. You can find the full fact sheet about the dangers of binge drinking here. Additionally, finding or forming clubs that raise awareness against binge drinking at your college can help students understand the problem with binge drinking.
I know that nobody wants to be a literal buzzkill but we also need to understand that thousands of binge-drinking related deaths are happening to people our age each year and we need to accept the fact that heavily drinking impairs the minds of those who are in charge of our future. We need to know that this level of drinking at American colleges has never been seen before and our age demographic is at the climax of it. I hope that as this August rolls around, ourselves and our peers make the conscious decision to take care of our minds, our bodies, and our culture. I hope that we can eventually reduce these statistics by taking precautionary measures to educate ourselves and our friends on the dangers of cultural binge drinking. Our minds, our memories, our educations matter and we deserve more for ourselves than to just reduce it to a time period in our lives known for getting blackout wasted, attending the funerals of fallen classmates, and for forgetting what we learned right after taking our finals.
