Fighting campus drinking
Note: This was not a popular piece. I think it was just too raw and unvarnished for most people's taste. In 2003, one of my high school buddies who I'd long lost contact with died of a heroin overdose. Hearing that news shook me up big time. I would have written this a little, but not significantly, differently in 2000 had I known he had become an addict.
Raleigh News & Observer, April 9, 2000
By Stuart Rojstaczer
DURHAM -- I am a professor at a university that, like a few others, recently experienced the alcohol-related death of a student. My university's president has publicly stated that we have an alcohol problem on our campus. I agree and so would most faculty members on any campus in the country.
We are collectively undergoing a tremendous amount of soul searching, trying to find solutions. Alcohol abuse on college campuses has become a major issue and has been covered extensively by the national press. Even Harvard University, the standard bearer of higher education, has weighed in with its own report and finds that binge drinking is on the rise. There are calls to return to a former time when students behaved more responsibly.
But I am not awash in nostalgia about the old days when students behaved responsibly in their use of alcohol and other drugs. I don't think they ever did, and they certainly haven't for the last few decades. I know that I didn't.
To be precise, I didn't do alcohol as a student. In my group of friends, alcohol was taboo because it was something your mom and dad did. Instead we did drugs. We took care of ourselves in a haphazard fashion. We were, in retrospect, dumb and stupid in our behavior. But no parent or university was going to be able to convince us to change our ways.
We could have died. We could have ended up in prison. In fact, someone I knew did die. And in fact, someone I knew ended up in prison for dealing drugs.
But we, my friends and I, weren't scared. Sure, we knew these people. We hung out with them. But we thought that these tragedies were isolated incidents. The possibility that we would fall, we thought was negligible. Somehow, by a mixture of luck and the law of averages, we managed to survive virtually unscathed. Of course, I can remember hardly a thing of those years. So I more or less threw away three years of my life.
I'm not an expert on human psychology by a long shot. But I do know that a significant percentage of teenagers feel the need to attack their brains with drugs and alcohol on a regular basis. My friends and I felt that need back then. Kids of today still feel that need. There will always be a core group of substance abusers on any campus whose influence on student culture will wax and wane for reasons that have only little to do with university policies toward alcohol and drugs.
Substance abuse is embedded in the fabric of college life. We can win small battles on our campuses in fighting alcohol and drug use. We should fight those battles, but we cannot expect to win the war.
For many, it's a right of passage. In your teenage years, emotions are at a peak. And maybe because of that alcohol and drugs are so attractive. They dull the emotions to a tolerable level. They smooth frayed edges. Like sex, it's a new and exciting experience that many can't get enough of.
Unlike sex, however, getting polluted tends to become less alluring as you get older. I stopped taking drugs by the time I hit 24. I never looked back. Most of my friends from that time, the ones that I know about at any rate, did more or less the same.
Talking to students about alcohol and drug use today, I don't see a whole lot of difference between my experiences as a teenager and theirs. They are getting wasted more on alcohol than on drugs, but that's about it for differences. To my mind they are making a subtle and slightly more legal choice. For whatever reasons, some feel a compelling need to get wasted on a regular basis just like I felt that need. Sure, it's self-destructive behavior. I can tell them that it's self-destructive, as can their parents and university officials. I think that we should all do so. But we should realize that only a few will heed this message.
We can and should enact policies that promote responsible drinking. We can and should promote alternative recreational activities. It's true that in enacting changes like these, which are being undertaken on many college campuses, we are probably only nibbling at the edge of the problem. These policies will not impact the core community of alcohol and drug users on campus, but they have the potential, if done in cooperation with students, to have a positive impact on those on themargins of substance abuse culture. Sometimes nibbling on the edge of a problem is the best that can be done.
It's inevitable that regardless of campus policies on alcohol, kids will still get drunk. Kids will get high. Like our nation's war on drugs, university rules concerning alcohol and drugs, even "zero tolerance" rules, can be expected to have only limited success. We are left with the unsettling feeling that we have no choice but to accept some significant risk associated with substance abuse.
Just how bad is it to accept this risk? The fact is that we accept many risks for our college-age children. We know that there is always the possibility, however remote, that they might die on their next car ride, plane ride, or thrill-filled adventure somewhere in a distant land. We just hope that, by luck and the law of averages, our students survive their youth and thrive in their adulthood. And almost every one of them does survive and thrive.
Thankfully, they manage to successfully pass through what are, for many people, difficult, risk-filled years. It has been going on like this for generations.