Colleges tackling binge drinking

At midnight last Halloween, Josh Youse rushed to the room of a Unity College freshman who had passed out from drinking at an off-campus party and been carried back to her room to sleep it off.

Youse, a resident adviser at Eastview residential hall, tried to rouse her. Instead of waking, she started dry-heaving.

Youse called for help, and emergency medical personnel managed to wake her, and determined she would be OK.

This was not an isolated event, Youse said. Encounters with alcohol-related violence, property damage and aggression at his college's small rural campus of 520 students in Unity are a regular part of his job.

"People's cars have been messed with. People individually have been messed with," said Youse, 23, a senior from Kutztown, Pa. "I don't know how to fix it."

Reports of college alcohol abuse have increased in the decade since binge drinking and other alcohol problems on campuses became a national issue, and seven years after Maine colleges and universities banded together to address the problem by forming Maine's Higher Education Alcohol Prevention Project.

"It is the largest single health and educational problem we have on campuses today. It needs to be front and center in all our conversation regarding college, college students and their risky behavior," said Dr. Paul Berkner, medical director of Colby College's Garrison-Foster Health Center.

Liquor law violations are increasing at Maine's colleges and universities. Statewide, the number of liquor law violations, such as underage drinking, reported by Maine higher education institutions to the U.S. Department of Education rose 57 percent from 2002 to 2006, the most recent data available.

The number of drinking-related incidents involving arrests or disciplinary actions reported by Maine colleges grew from 1,985 in 2002 to 3,120 in 2006. Nationally, 196,860 arrests and disciplinary actions were reported in 2002, compared with 251,462 in 2006, a 28 percent increase. Twice in the current school year, Maine college students have died in alcohol-related accidents.

In November, Brett Gould, a freshman at the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, was killed in an alcohol-related crash on the way back to school after a weekend of off-campus partying.

Three weeks later, Adam Baxter, a freshman University of Maine soccer player from England, died over Thanksgiving weekend at a Portland home from acute alcohol intoxication after drinking with friends. Two young men are now awaiting trial on felony charges of supplying liquor to Baxter and several other minors.

Both Maine Maritime and University of Maine officials had just undertaken new measures to curb alcohol abuse among freshmen when the deaths occurred. Officials at other Maine campuses say it is only luck that has spared them similar tragedies.

"Every night I go to sleep there is some part of my brain asking, 'Is this going to be the night I get the phone call?'" Berkner said.

Each year, about 100 students at Colby College in Waterville are treated at the college health center for possible alcohol overdose. About 50 of those students wind up at Maine General Medical Center's emergency room in Waterville.

Every year, several cases are serious enough to be moved to the intensive care unit, such as one last winter when a security guard discovered a student who had passed out and required a ventilator.

At Saint Joseph's College of Maine in Standish, there were 345 liquor law violations among a student body of 1,050 in 2006, the latest data available -- the college had the highest number of violations as a percentage of student enrollment in Maine that year, 33 percent. Colby College had the second-highest rate at 19 percent. Both attribute their high numbers to vigorous enforcement of their liquor policies.

Common subject now, then

Alcohol-abuse incidents are a common subject in campus newspaper headlines.

Last month, students urinated, vomited and discarded beer cans in the bus that transported Bates College students from their Lewiston campus to Portland for a senior class-sponsored trip. According to the March 11 edition of The Bates Student newspaper, one of the bus drivers vowed never to make the trip again.

In January, a Bowdoin College junior was hospitalized after a drunken fight outside the Brunswick Apartments, according to The Orient, the Brunswick college's student newspaper.

"The victim, whose name the Orient is withholding, had consumed a significant quantity of alcohol over the course of the evening and says he does not remember what happened," it reported in the Feb. 1 article.

At the University of Maine, the Maine Campus student newspaper regularly lists crimes related to drinking in its police blotter.

Alcohol abuse by college students is not new -- the drinking culture has long been a part of college life. The University of Maine fight song, "The Maine Stein Song," sung by sports fans since it was first written in 1902, is a toast to drinking. Colby students observe a daylong drinking event called "Doghead," rising at 4 a.m. on the Saturday before St. Patrick's Day to drink green beer. Colby seniors celebrate the last days of classes sipping champagne with their professors on the library steps.

Coming to college with habit

What is new, say college officials, is the increase in binge drinking, commonly defined as the consumption of five drinks in a row by a male or four drinks in a row by a female. A number of recent surveys and other research conclude that such alcohol abuse is growing both nationwide and in Maine.

The number of students who drink to get drunk rose 21 percent, and the number of students who binge drink rose 16 percent from 1993 to 2001, according to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University in its 2007 report on alcohol abuse on college campuses.

A 2006 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that the percentage of 18- to 25-year-olds in Maine who reported binge drinking in the past month was higher than the U.S. average but lowest among the New England states.

College students and officials have various explanations for why binge drinking is on the rise. Some say the problem starts long before college. "Students are coming to college with habitual drinking habits already formed, and it is starting younger and younger," said Deirdre Davis, dean of students at Maine Maritime Academy.

Alcohol advertising sends the message that people who drink are sexier, more attractive and have more fun. James Terhume, dean of students at Colby, said American culture also tolerates alcohol abuse.

"There are a lot of people who believe college drinking is a rite of passage and others who are outraged that underage drinking takes place," Terhume said.

He said there are parents who absolutely want to be notified about any alcohol-related incident involving their children and others who do not want to hear about it.

"We get a lot of parents who call and go, 'Why don't you back off,' " said Terhume.

'Pregaming' before heading out

Some believe the 21-year-old drinking age has driven underage drinking behind closed doors, where it is more likely to get out of control. They say that it was only after the drinking age was raised nationally in 1984 that binge drinking became common on college campuses.

Today, students often drink large volumes of alcohol --called "pregaming" or "preloading" -- before heading out to sports events and other activities where underage drinking is banned.

"In some ways, it makes it that taboo item that has more appeal to someone 18 to 20 years old," said Tedd Goundie, dean of students at Bates College, which banned hard alcohol from campus in 2000 after 20 students required treatment for alcohol poisoning after a Halloween party.

In 2005, the latest year for which comparable data was available, Maine college campuses registered 41 alcohol-related arrests or disciplinary actions per 1,000 students.

Alcohol education specialists said Maine's numbers reflect greater enforcement, not greater rates of alcohol abuse.

"And that is a good sign," said Erica Schmitz, director of 21 Reasons, a Portland substance abuse prevention program.

They said the rate of alcohol abuse on Maine campuses is no better or worse than other states.

Some Maine students, though, say that part of the problem here is boredom and the lack of activities for students at Maine's rural campuses. "There are not a lot of things to do particularly in the winter when you don't want to go out in the snow. You kind of make your own fun and that leads to making less-than-good decisions," said Tyler Ingram, 22, of North Hampton, N.H., a senior English major at Colby.

His classmate, Eric ffitch, an international studies and Spanish major from Bainbridge Island, Wash., disagrees. He said he has seen the same level of alcohol abuse at universities in the middle of big cities.

"I have coined my own term, 'temporary collegiate alcoholism,' which pretty much describes all the people who drink here," ffitch said. He said he rarely drank in high school, because he would have had to drive home and was terrified of the dangers of drunken driving. But that changed for ffitch in college.

He said it was easy to drink because he no longer had to drive to get home, there were no parents waiting up and he was surrounded by 21-year-olds willing to buy the beer for an underage drinker.

There also was the peer pressure.

"If you come back to Colby at 10 p.m., you are going to be assaulted by hordes of drinking students. There is this pressure to be drunk to be part of the crowd," he said.

Youse, at Unity College, said he is pessimistic about solving what appears to be an intractable problem.

"Even with deaths it doesn't change," said Youse.

Kennebec Journal