Curb antiquated thinking on alcohol

Editorial
Pipe Dream (SUNY-Binghamton)

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. (U-WIRE) ˜ In a perfect world, the legal drinking age would be 18. Liquor would be easily accessible, and college students wouldn't have to gorge themselves to excess when it was made available; in fact, there is some weight to that whole notion of the "forbidden fruit."

Speaking pragmatically, however, here are some ideas that are employable and likely to yield some results in the administration's newly resurrected crusade to combat alcohol-related crime:

First of all, quit with the rhetoric. We've been force-fed the hard facts on alcohol since eighth grade health class. Yes, it causes liver damage, and kills brain cells, and lowers inhibitions, and blah, blah, blah. Continued efforts to drill that mind-numbing biological doctrine into our heads are just going to cause students to tune it out faster than they take the information in. This holds especially true for overly eager incoming freshmen hankering to experience their first underage-drinking escapade. Lectures about the evils of liquor have become as cliché as that old talk about the birds and the bees.

Enforce less. The "scared-straight" tactic may be keeping the hardened youth of America out of prisons nowadays, but it's certainly not deterring the average Binghamton University student's thirst for the frothy stuff. As the first portion of last century demonstrated, prohibition doesn't work. Just as the university assumed its role as a smoke-free campus, students, staff and faculty alike are still lighting up.

So what if 65 percent of Binghamton students have zero to four drinks when they party? Is the university trying to sway us with some peer pressure ploy?

That's lame, ladies and gentlemen. We may like to drink, but we're not stupid. And that's before we even bring the validity of the ad into question. As one Pipe Dream editor pointed out, how probable is it that the survey that turned out that 65 percent figure has pulled in the same result four years running?

To us, the ad sounds like a license to max out on that drink limit ˜ and for one 5-foot-2 editor-in-chief, any combination of four drinks usually ends in a trip of sin purging with the porcelain preacher.

How about telling us the facts that matter? Tell us that last weekend four students suffered severe alcohol poisoning and had their stomachs pumped, seven DUI arrests were made, two students were hurt at the hands of a drunk driver, three acts of vandalism wrecked students personal property and someone was raped. If you hit students with the evidence, perhaps you'll make a more convincing argument.

The administration needs to sit down and rethink the situation at hand. If there has been a higher incidence rate of alcohol-related crimes, how truly effective have past methods been? Students are going to drink regardless of whatever policy you enact to curb it, and the Binghamton University administration is not going to single-handedly end that trend. It's a right of passage and a part of college culture. At best, you can hope to play Holden Caulfield and catch them as they fall.

Copyright 2009 - Daily Egyptian