Alcoholism and the college student

Tuition isn’t the only thing GW can announce as it’s highest ever: so are alcohol violations. In 2006, Student Judicial Services posted flyers to warning students to exercise responsibility while drinking, since the violations were at the University’s highest number ever.

While binge-drinking has always been a tremendous issue at universities nationwide, statistics show that the problem is only getting worse. According to 2004 data from the U.S. Department of Education, the partying does not go unpunished, as campus alcohol violations increased 10 percent between 2003 and 2004, and with 176,929 college students, alcohol citations were also at an all-time high.

Beyond criminal behaviors, disorderly conduct, and reckless decision-making, college students should be worried about their psychological well-being. Glamorous shots of celebrities smiling while holding cosmopolitans are a thing of the past, and now it’s all Miss America getting rowdy at a nightclub, or Lindsay sporting an Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety chip. Such photographs not only reveal underage drinking, but the reckless partying associated with it.

College students often dismiss alcohol as the least of their problems, acknowledging cocaine, prescription medication, and other illicit drugs as far worse addictions.

“Everyone at any college in America drinks, it’s been the case for so long that it’s normalized,” says one GW male freshman. “The drinking age is dumb. It really should be that you have to be 21 or a college student to drink, because that’s what going to happen anyway.”

“Because such a high number of students here smoke pot and do coke, no one thinks twice about drinking,” his friend, a GW male sophomore, added.

Located in Baltimore, The Open Society Institute is an organization that focuses on critical urban issues, and notes that drug addiction is one of the nation’s biggest problems. Their website reports that “over nine million Americans need drug treatment, making addicting more prevalent than coronary heart disease and stroke and as prevalent as cancer.”

However, drug rehabilitation centers admit only a small percentage of these Americans each year, and the reason is not just monetary. The majority of addicted youth disclose being too ashamed to enter one prior to their college graduation. While many silently cope with their dependencies, others use alternative drugs to cure their addiction to another.

Antabuse is one such example. The pill is comprised of disulfiram, an ingredient that alters the body’s ability to metabolize alcohol so that drinking feels like a hangover.

Once the pill is ingested, the normally relaxing effects of alcohol become brutal, as any alcohol intake triggers increased blood pressure, blurred vision, stomach cramps, dizziness, chest pains, intense sweating, coughing attacks, and any other unpleasant reaction that would make you never want to sip a beer, ever again.

Psychologically, the treatment appears logical: why drink to feel pain? Unfortunately, scientists have underestimated the intensity of alcoholism, and it cannot be cured with a pill.

“It’s archaic, people don’t use it anymore,” said a coordinator at the Watershed Addiction Treatment Program, one of the nation’s top three private drug-treatment centers. “An alcoholic needs a proper medical detox, followed by outpatient treatment and a twelve-step program.”

The 24-year-old coordinator, who prefers to remain anonymous, entered the Southern Florida center when he was a senior at SUNY Albany in upstate New York. Seeking treatment for opiate addiction, he says that he felt like the only one at his age getting clean, but he realized he had to.

“Students think that they’ll graduate, go back home, and that all the fast times of college are going to be over. But so many are going to just be depressed, and that’s when they’ll realize they have a problem,” he said.

Moving from a sheltered, Long Island home to a school with a hard partying reputation, binge drinking led to drug experimentation during his freshman year. As a sophomore, he began dealing marijuana, coincidentally with his new roommate who had just transferred from GW.

“Alcoholism and drug abuse is genetic,” he said. “And if you have the addictive gene, college is the point in your life when it takes full effect, and before you know it, you’re an alcoholic.”

Many nineteen to 25 year-olds may be having the time of their lives partying, but they are also becoming a statistic - the age group which is slowly becoming that of the majority of addicted Americans.

The Daily Colonial