To Expand on Ed the Head’s answer Shade about the price of beer… Not only is 5 cent beer small plastic glasses of crappy beer (usually Coor’s light around here), but you usually have to pay a $5 or $10 cover to get into the bar that is having this special.
Now to the problem at hand… binge drinking my ass! Puritans in our society hate alcohol and want it gone. They see people do unruly things while drunk and it scares them. So they do everything that they can to marginalize alcohol and those who drink it. They arbitrarily define an imaginary problem (binge drinking = 5 drinks.) Oooh! It has a name! It must be bad! Binge! That doesn’t sound good! Let’s try to get rid of it!
Look! Students who binge drink do bad things! HEY! NEWSFLASH! People who DON’T drink ALSO do bad things! The behavior studies all lack control groups. And some of the bad things that the drunk students do is a DIRECT result of the Puritanical laws put in place to curb drinking.
In the US about 18 years ago, the Feds forced states to raise the drinking age to 21 (was 19 in my state). So most college students were then banned from bars. At the University I went to, a couple years later year they outlawed alcohol parties in the Dorms. Then they started cracking down on Fraternity parties. So what happened? Did drinking stop? HAH! Did Prohibition work? What happened was that the drunk students had nowhere to go, spilled into the streets, and had a “riot”. If you can call 5,000 bored drunks milling around looking for something to do a riot.
Sooo, solution they came up with? Find drunks something to do? Oh noooo, that would condone underage drinking. Crack down harder next year! Which didn’t work. Bah. Morons.
Gimme a break. People act like the world is going to end if 17-21 year olds get drunk. Heaven forbid you want to raise your kid to know what the effects of alcohol are in the safety of your own house. Then you are the bad parent who lets kids drink. Better to keep them ignorant so they can puke their guts out at college when they turn 21 and no-one is smart enough to roll them on their side.
IMHO a good part of the problem is how alcohol in any amount is made a “forbidden fruit” that is only for “grownups.” So in order to prove one is a “grownup,” (which is the major aim of most adolescents and young adults) one must consume alcohol. At least that’s what’s going on in their subconscious.
It is my understanding that in France, whatever other shortcomings they may or may not have, there is a very sensible attitude. A small amount of alcohol, usually wine, is completely normal. Little children have a little bit, often watered down. Young people learn what moderation is, and have nothing to prove by drinking. OTOH, out-of-control drinking and drunkenness is considered quite boorish and unsophistocated.
We would be a lot better off if we were more relaxed about the whole subject.
My problem with alcohol is that I only like the good stuff and cannot stomach most beers. Now that I have developed a taste for decent whiskey, how the hell am I aoing to survive as a broke grad student next year?
Also, I too quibble with the definition of binge drinking. It’s completely meaningless unless time is factored in to the definition.
The definition of binge drinking would be meaningless even if time was fatored in. It is an arbitrary number that some moron happened to decide was too many drinks, with no consideration of circumstances or appropriateness.
After all, 3 drinks in an hour is too many for most people if you are hopping in a car and driving through a school zone.
But if your only plan for the evening is to sit at home and watch the best movie ever filmed, why is it arbitrarily bad that by the time they eat Robin’s minstrels and there is much rejoicing, you have a stack of 8 empty Guiness cans next to your couch and you’ve decided that pissing in the cat’s litter box is much less work than going all the way to the toilet?
Back from another night of binge drinking! Out with my parents, y’see. They’re in town, so we went out for beer and appetizers, then went to the boat show, then went out for a leisurely nice dinner. I had five drinks and I still drove home!
(Five drinks in four hours; just call me Betty Binge.)