Every autumn, millions of college students will begin their fall semester of college, with the rituals of campus life: class registration, rushing for sororities, and “pre-gaming” in their rooms.

“Pre-gaming” is another name for binge drinking. It is now common practice among 18-20 years old students who cannot legally buy or consume alcohol.

    This binging usually involves sitting in a dorm room or an off campus dwelling and drinking as much hard liquor as possible before going to the evening’s sports event.  Every year thousands of college and non-college people are received in hospital emergency rooms with acute alcohol poisoning. Such hospitalizations are routine on campuses across the nation. When students are hospitalized, college administrations tend to react with vain attempts to make their college campuses “dry” (How Bingeing Became the New College Sport).

    How often a person drinks alcohol – how much, how often, when and what kind – relates directly to health problems, even in teenagers. Research shows that binge drinking in particular, increases the risk of cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer. This is primarily because of the rate and speed with which the alcohol is ingested into the body.

    Many college campuses have ritual games that involve consuming vast amounts of alcohol in an extremely short period of time. A study at Boston University revealed that binge drinkers are much more prone to accidents than moderate drinkers. This research also indicated that binge drinkers are twice as likely to have suffered a serious injury in the previous six months as compared to the average drinker.

    Harvard University’s School of Public health College Alcohol Study revealed the following information on binge drinking:

• Students most likely to binge drink are age 23 or younger, white, and belong to a fraternity or sorority.
• If they were binge drinkers in high school, they were three times more likely to binge in college
• 44% of the college students engaged in binge drinking during the two weeks before the survey
• Over half of the binge drinkers, almost one in four students, were frequent binge drinkers. This means they binged three or more times in a two-week period.
• The percentage of students who were binge drinkers was nearly uniform from freshman to senior year, even though students under 21 are prohibited from purchasing alcohol.
  

The implications of these studies show that binge drinking is a widespread phenomenon on many of our college campuses. This problem interferes significantly with the mission of higher education, and also carries with it serious risks of potential alcoholism, disease, injury, or death. It is clear that college and university administrators need to intensify their quest for new approaches in educating and preventing their students from the ravages of binge drinking on college campuses and in the surrounding communities ( Is it Serious?)

 

 

“How Bingeing Became the new College Sport” Time Magazine. 2005. 09 Oct. 2005
    http://www.infotrac-college.thomsonlearning.com

“Is it Serious?” Alcohol Policies Project. March 2004. 13 Oct. 2005
    http://www.espinet.org