Lately, it seems like a lot of college students are dying of alcohol poisening. The latest drinking death has become a staple of the evening news.
Colleges have been catching a lot of flack when their students poisen themselves. Lately my school has been tightening up their alcohol policy and forceing new students to attend workshops on the subject. I think a couple of colleges got sued over deaths.
What the hell?!?!?! First off, it isn’t like the college gave them alcohol. Often times the deaths occur off campus, completely out of the purvue of these colleges.
But really, you have to be UNBELIEVEABLY stupid to die of alcohol poisening. Your body has natural defenses, for God’s sake. If you drink too much, you go to sleep. You have to trick your body in order to ingest that much alcohol. And really, does it take a genius to figure out that if you drink 21 shots (or some other unbelieveably stupid stunt like that) you run a good chance of death? These are usually adults living on their own who are killing themselves, not six year olds who can’t be counted on to figure it out.
So for the love of god stop sueing someone when Junior is stupid enough to poisen himeself. It is not the school’s fault for not somehow preventing his death-by-dumbness. It is probably your fault for not teaching him the basics of staying alive (Lesson 25: Don’t ingest mass quantities of poisenous substances). Your outrage is outrageous, but for all the wrong reasons. Too bad your frat-boy son didn’t have a lick of self control and common sense.
Lately, it seems like a lot of college students are dying of alcohol poisening
Yeah, they’ve been dropping like flies all over the place :rolleyes:
It is probably your (parent’s) fault for not teaching him the basics of staying alive(Lesson 25: Don’t ingest mass quantities of poisenous substances). Your outrage is outrageous, but for all the wrong reasons. Too bad your frat-boy son didn’t have a lick of self control and common sense.
…because it’s ALWAYS their parents fault that the person fucks up, right? Give me a break.
Let us look to a phrase that seems to have disappeared lately…
Personal responsibility.
I think this is what you were trying to say we should have more of.
I agree.
You want to “prove” what a massive stud you are by downing 26 shots? And then you die from strangling on your own vomit or alcohol poisoning? Grand! Go ahead! Knock yourself out. Just remember that YOU did it to YOU.
Personal responsibility.
Accept it, dumbass. If you are this stupid you deserve to die. Thank you for cleaning up the gene pool. And please, spare me the “but his frat buddies made him” do it. If he can’t stand up for himself during a good damn drinking party than Goddess knows he won’t be able to stand up for himself anywhere else.
They’ve done some new research that suggests they’ve been going about the educational aspects all wrong. Many campuses conduct an “EVILS OF BINGS DRINKING!” publicity campaign. New research is showing that it tends to perpetuate the myth that most people on campus drink. Students who don’t drink, or drink in moderation, start to wonder if they’re in the minority. And it sets forth the idea that all college entertainment involves drinking.
It’s far more effective to run a campaign that emphasizes how many smart, interesting, with-it college students DON’T drink (or don’t drink to pukedom levels) and manage to have fun anyway. Who knew?
I agree with the personal responsibility thing. We just had a drinking death here on campus, but for once it involved someone old enough to buy his own alcohol, and he did all his drinking at home, at a party that he hosted himself. It was just sheer stupidity, no liability. Except the fact that his dumb friends didn’t call 911 soon enough.
Cranky, if I may respectfully disagree, I think stressing the dangers of binge drinking is one of the few intelligent things campuses are doing.
At least in American schools, “alcohol education” is almost invariably abstinence-oriented. Kids are told not to drink, but they’re given little real information about how much alcohol is safe, why you need to stay hydrated, etc. It seems to me that this sets up the same kind of problems you see with abstinence-only sex education – the kids who follow the message are the ones who probably weren’t going to engage in the prohibited activity anyway. The ones who do choose to drink (or have sex) have no idea how to do so responsibly. Intelligent drinking is a learned skill, and it’s obviously better to learn about alcohol and its effects in a controlled environment – an opportunity most American kids don’t have, since it’s illegal for their parents to serve them so much as a glass of wine with dinner. No wonder they consume absurd amounts when they finally have the opportunity.
And of course, if drinking on campus is Forbidden-with-a-capital-F, students will go off campus. In cars. Which means the “dry campus” is one of the stupidest feel-good, do-worse-than-nothing ideas universities have ever come up with, which is saying a lot.
You CAN kill yourself by drinking too much, without being an
idiot. If you drink, then you’ve undoubtedly experienced a
hangover–something which you never planned on having. YOu
didn’t leave the house the previous night and plan on getting so drunk that, next day, the sound of a little finch
outside your window would resemble that of an angry vulture.
BAsically, alchohol affects your judgement, and for some people, the more they drink, the more they are likely to continue drinking on a given occasion.
I think the problem with alcohol education is that we really
only emphasize drinking and driving. Don’t do illegal drugs at all, we say, but it’s OK to drink if you don’t drive. If you’re going to a party, designate a driver who promises not to drink a drop while everyone else is whooping it up. What does this imply? That as long as there’s no driving involved, no serious harm can come of alcohol. So then 17 and 18 year old kids arrive at college, and the parties are
not across town, but two dorm buildings over. No driving is involved, so they think they can really cut loose.
Lots of times there are other drugs being used at the party, which exacerbates the situation.
I know in the paragraph above I might have sounded as if I advocate banning alcohol much as illegal drugs have been banned, but I don’t mean to suggest that. I’m actually
very much a libertarian when it comes to alcohol and other intoxicants. I merely think that a lot of the problems with
alcohol on college campuses come from a very poorly thought out approach to educating students on the matter.
Do you have a source that backs this up? I was always under the impression that parents could serve their children alcohol in their own home, so long as they weren’t putting whiskey in their baby’s bottle or somesuch.
Hm, in retrospect, I think you may be right that parents serving alcohol to their children is illegal in some states, but I think it’s legal in others. I wish I could find out which states though; it would be interesting to see if my parents were breaking the law or not.
Parents are able to serve their own children alcohol, but then move on to questionable legal territory if they allow their child to leave the house while intoxicated.
The only information I could find about the other side of the fence was in Virginia, where it is illegal for ANY adult, parent or otherwise, to serve or sell alcohol to ANY minor. This site focused on the illegality of parents allowing alcohol to be consumed at parties in their home, and didn’t specifically address the “wine with dinner” scenario.
This whole phenomenon does still rather amaze me, though. At nearly every party on campus, some idiot gets hauled away in an ambulance. How the fuck do you drink that much? I’ve been blasted off my ass fairly often, and even then it was pretty easy to tell when to stop to avoid puking–and that’s still long before poisoning territory.
Hehehe…On halloween night I was woken up by the sounds of sirens. This time it ends up that a student’s DAD wanted to show off to his kid’s friends what a party animal is, and he drank too much…
It might technically be against the law, but such a thing would never be enforced…unless the gubment saw some sort of child abuse going on (you know, if you’re feeding your five year old Jim Beam, that’s not really setting a good example). While it probably is technically illegal, in practice such a thing would (and could) never be enforced.
Yes, I’m well aware the law is rarely enforced (hell, even my parents disobeyed it), but the fact that it’s on the books at all suggests that we, as a society, have chosen Puritanism over honest education.
I don’t know if this is the case everywhere, but the standard freshman “alcohol education program” at my college had one main message: Do not drink. Period. For the rest of the afternoon, they told us how to resist peer pressure, as if nobody could possibly choose to drink if he or she weren’t coerced by evil peers. (In fact, during four years of college I never witnessed any pressure directed against students who didn’t drink.) We might have heard a word or two about the dangers of binge drinking – but it was defined as more than four drinks in a row for males, more than three for females. Since most students are well aware that four drinks won’t kill you, they assume that the rest of the spiel is equally inaccurate. Such miseducation does more harm than good.
I went to college in D.C. from '86-'90. When I first arrived, the drinking age was 18 for beer/wine, and 21 for hard alcohol. The university’s alcohol policy was you must be 18 for beer/wine, and hard alcohol was banned from campus (this rule wasn’t enforced, but no one drank the hard stuff - why buy it illegally if you could get beer and wine legally?). The freshman dorms had floor funds to pay for beer and parties, the university provided alcohol for the orientation festivities, etc.
My freshman year, about 20 people were brought to the hospital for alcohol poisoning.
During my freshman year, D.C. changed its law to make it 21 for all alcohol, with a grandfather clause (that I missed :mad: ). In response, the next year the university made all the freshman dorms dry, forbade open containers in public places, and instituted a truly bizarre “alternative beverage” rule for parties (for every amount of alcohol, you needed to make available a set amount of non-alcoholic beverages, according to a formula that would befuddle Stephen Hawkings). The number of people who went to the ER with alcohol poisoning more than quintupled. Why? It’s very hard to sneak a keg in your backpack, so the kids smuggled in vodka and grain instead - much more dangerous.
The university’s policy my freshman year wasn’t so much enlightened as intelligent. It used peer pressure to its advantage - the school pronounced that its students were adults, they would be treated like adults, and they must act like adults. Another subtle thing they did was the Jesuits often crashed the parties - not to buzzkill them (indeed, the drinking capacity of the average Jesuit is a sight to behold), but you were less likely to get stupid in the presence of clergy.
The first time I got drunk (my 21st birthday), I got sick. Why? Because I had no idea how much alcohol was too much. I had 6 beers in about 2 hours, and that made me puke all night. I think it’s true what some others are saying, that the education system is all wrong (don’t drink at all) especially since nearly everyone of age does (this is my own estimation, don’t ask me for cites). Luckily I didn’t go too overboard (I wasn’t in a heavy drinking environment), and now I know how much I can handle responsibly. Unfortunately for some, they never get to figure it out for themselves.
As for education, I agree it’s fully a joke. Instead of being honest with kids about alcohol and its danger, they instead choose to follow the DARE model and scare kids out of alcohol. Well, one thing I’ve discovered is that kids aren’t as stupid as we think and they have bullshit monitors as well. Once they discover that some parts of what they are taught is bullshit, then what’s to stop them from disregarding the kernels of truth in there? I think in alcohol education (and sex and drug education as well), we have to sit down with kids and say “Yes…these things are fun at times, but they do also have serious risks, and I’m not going to tell you not to drink, but I want you to understand what can happen if you DO and try to avoid that”
As for education, I agree it’s fully a joke. Instead of being honest with kids about alcohol and its danger, they instead choose to follow the DARE model and scare kids out of alcohol. Well, one thing I’ve discovered is that kids aren’t as stupid as we think and they have bullshit monitors as well. Once they discover that some parts of what they are taught is bullshit, then what’s to stop them from disregarding the kernels of truth in there? I think in alcohol education (and sex and drug education as well), we have to sit down with kids and say “Yes…these things are fun at times, but they do also have serious risks, and I’m not going to tell you not to drink, but I want you to understand what can happen if you DO and try to avoid that”
Of course, there’s also the 21 shot ritual that most 21 year olds undertake…and 21 shots in a rather limited amount of time is going to lead to high intoxication (I wouldn’t try it and I weigh 240 pounds…couldn’t imagine some little 120 pound girl doing that!)
