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Alcohol
education should expand beyond extremes We hear it all the time. “Binge-drinking is up 13.73 percent in the first month of this fiscal quarter compared to the third week of the second quarter last year,” or, “One student was killed from alcohol poisoning related to binge-drinking in an initiation (hazing) ritual.” Well what exactly is binge-drinking? Does your best friend call you up Friday night and see if you feel like going binge-drinking somewhere? Do you hold off from that fifth drink because you know five drinks in a row is a binge, whereas four is perfectly acceptable? You’re probably glad you just got in the car and drove home after number four before things got out of hand. The point here is that there is no connection between the binge-drinking statistics we hear about on the news and the actual real-life action of drinking alcohol. Avoiding the judgments about whether drinking alcohol is morally right or wrong, or sometimes acceptable or sometimes not, we are completely missing the target in our efforts to make young people drink more responsibly. Sure there are warnings that binge drinking is dangerous, even deadly, but these warnings are traveling a road parallel to the one most of America’s youth is on. That is, they just don’t meet up. The average 21-year-old drinker doesn’t connect the drinking of his eighth beer of the night with the statistics of binge-drinking. We are losing touch with the connection needed for educating young people about the dangers of drinking by using tedious definitions such as “the consumption of X amount of drinks in Y hours,” which only makes young people further ignore the issue. The media presents our youth and young adults with the problem of binge-drinking just as it presents the AIDS epidemic in Africa. It is just another seemingly distant problem that doesn’t directly affect them. Binge-drinking statistics clearly arouse concern among parents, but to young people they are just more useless numbers that are as meaningless as the equations in their calculus books. By using the term “binge” drinking, we continue to label this problem with a definition that allows certain people to dismiss it as irrelevant to their drinking habits. Few people would want to be labeled a “binge-drinker,” and those who really are at risk of harming themselves are likely to ignore binge-drinking statistics and warnings. Excessive drinkers don’t need to be treated like they are lepers, they just need to be told the facts. There is no need to hear about the dangers of binge-drinking, but rather to hear about the dangers associated with all levels of drinking. There is plenty of room to teach our youth about how alcohol can be used responsibly while also telling them the dangers and risks that accompany the consumption of large amounts of alcohol. We don’t need to repeal the 21st Amendment (would that un-repeal the 18th Amendment?). We just need to educate people about alcohol without using vague and scientific terms that confuse everyone and make them ignore the facts. Jeff
Dennis is a junior sociology major from Gail. |
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