As a college student I have to bring up a problem that has recently caught my eye. Drinking in the college environment has done much harm to the well-being of the students. The more I see drunken people around campus the more I become concerned for their safety. As I think about this more I start to question if we as body should be allowed to even possess alcohol, regardless of age. While alcohol incidents that include death are very seldom, many other categories have gone up; the number of binge drinkers-those who intend to drink to get drunk- has gone up, the number of Minor in Consumption tickets has gone up and the number of alcohol-related crimes has increased. With the full intent of ensuring the safety of my fellow students, I call for a realization in the evolution of the combination of alcohol and college as well as what harms this pact can produce. There is also the problem of how academics can be affected by drinking. If there is a problem academics which should be the first reason why any student should go to college, than this problem with should be fixed. Additionally, if there is a problem that affects a person’s safety, it also needs to be addressed.
Alcohol has become a big part of college, as we all know. In The "Risky Business" of Binge Drinking Among College Students, author Joyce M. Wolburg gives many statistics about the harm that alcohol brings to college campuses. About five and a half billion dollars’ worth of alcohol is bought by college students annually, which is more than tuition, books, and rooms combined (Wolburg 24). It is one thing if we spend a lot of money for college itself, but when students have the desire to buy alcohol in that kind of manner, we have to understand that there is a problem t...
... middle of paper ...
...d or affected in a negative way. One purpose of a college or university is to promote safety to its students. If we don’t promote enough safety our students will be thrown into unsafe drinking.
Works Cited
Hunter, Drew. "Peer to Peer: Effective College Learning: About Alcohol and Other Health Issues." Change 36.3 (2004): 40-44. JSTOR. Web. 8 Jan. 2011.
Lederman, Linda C. "Changing the Culture of College Drinking." Web. 8 Jan. 2011.
Wechsler, Henry, Toben Nelson, and Elissa Weitzman. "From Knowledge to Action: How Harvard's College Alcohol Study Can Help Your Campus Design a Campaign against Student Alcohol Abuse." Change 32.1 (2000): 32-43. JSTOR. Web. 8 Jan. 2011.
Wolburg, Joyce M. "The "Risky Business" of Binge Drinking among College Students: Using Risk Models for PSAs and Anti-Drinking Campaigns." Change 36.3 (2004): 23-39. JSTOR. Web. 8 Jan. 2011.
Mantel, B. (2006, August 18). Drinking on campus. CQ Researcher, 16, 649-672. Retrieved from http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/
Getting Serious About Eradicating Binge Drinking is an informative article by Henry Wechsler. Wechsler has worked with the College Alcohol study since its creation in 1992, and he also lectures at the School of Public Health at Harvard. In his article, Weschler discusses the prominent trend of binge drinking on college campuses and how to solve the widespread problem. Binge drinking is a term used to describe the act drinking alcoholic beverages with the intention of becoming intoxicated over a short period of time.
Balko, Radley. "Let My Students Drink." Reason. (Feb. 2009). Web. 19 Feb. 2016. John McCardell was a former college president who took his experience dealing with underage drinking and decided to develop an organization called Choose Responsibly. The organization supports lower the legal drinking age. He later developed the Amethyst Initiative to help campuses across the U.S. to join together. In the article, Mr. McCardell gives his reasons for starting the growing movement. The purpose of this article is to inform other college delegates and leaders about the organizations they can join they share the same beliefs. It was published in a magazine that discusses rising issues to help promote the initiative. The article is unique due to its interview arrangement which gives it a more personal feel. My thesis is supported by this article because it provides me with
“80 percent of teen-agers have tried alcohol, and that alcohol was a contributing factor in the top three causes of death among teens: accidents, homicide and suicide” (Underage, CNN.com pg 3). Students may use drinking as a form of socializing, but is it really as good as it seems? The tradition of drinking has developed into a kind of “culture” fixed in every level of the college student environment. Customs handed down through generations of college drinkers reinforce students' expectation that alcohol is a necessary ingredient for social success. These perceptions of drinking are the going to ruin the lives of the students because it will lead to the development alcoholism. College students who drink a lot, while in a college environment, will damage themselves mentally, physically, and socially later in life, because alcohol adversely affects the brain, the liver, and the drinkers behavior.
Although high-risk drinkers are a minority in all ethnic groups, their behavior is far from a harmless “rite of passage.” In fact, drinking has pervasive consequences that compel our attention. The most serious consequence of high-risk college drinking is death. The U.S. Department of Education has evidence that at least 84 college students have died since 1996 because of alcohol poisoning or related injury—and they believe the actual total is higher because of incomplete reporting. When alcohol-related traffic crashes and off-campus injuries are taken into consideration, it is estimated that over 1,400 college students die each year from alcohol-related unintentional injuries. Additionally, over 500,000 full-time students sustain nonfatal unintentional injuries, and 600,000 are hit or assaulted by another student who has been drinking. Administrators are well aware of the burden alcohol presents to the campus environment. In addition, the 1997, 1999, and 2001 Harvard surveys found that the majority of students living in dorms and Greek residences, who do not drink excessively, still experience day-to-day problems as a result of other students’ misuse of alcohol. The prevalence of these “secondhand effects” varies across ...
Lily, Henrietta M. and Harmon, Daniel E. Alcohol Abuse and Binge Drinking. New York: the Rosen Publishing Group Inc., 2012. Print.
Many temptations are faced in college culture and one of them is underage drinking and driving. Underage drinking and driving has essentially become an epidemic, rapidly developing among today’s youth. College culture has come to encourage drinking and driving through the places and people that surround the students (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, October 2002). Some people don’t see underage drinking as an issue, when in fact it is a huge issue that every teenager will face. Since underage drinking is illegal people want to rebel by drinking; additionally, alcohol is really easy to get ahold of in college. Since many students are going to drink, the first line of defense is to educate students about the effects of alcohol and what can happen if students do drink and drive. Unless we are able to put a stop to underage drinking and driving through education, and a system called smart start the problem wont get any better.
Using fear, while not aggressively, Silveri highlights the fact that excessive alcohol consumption is the third leading leading cause of preventable death. The author discusses this topic in a way that seems to be to scare anybody she is trying to convince. A mother reading this could worry about her daughter, or a young man in college who drinks often could take his drinking habits far more seriously after reading something like that. Also, ending the article on an optimistic note, she allows the reader to have some hope. Silveri mentions the reduction of maladaptive alcohol use through better recognition of the negative tendencies that comes with alcohol abuse in adolescents. (Adolescent Brain Development and Underage Drinking in the United States: Identifying Risks of Alcohol Use in College
We all know what it is like to wake up in the morning, with our head aching, and our body feeling like it was just hit by a train. College students world wide know this feeling. These are the results of binge drinking. The question of why college students continue to submit themselves to alcohol is unknown. While many reasons are given, the cause generally falls into one of three categories, peer pressure, insecurity, or to help solve there problems. But the one thing students don’t realize are the consequences and effects that binge drinking can have, health and social problems are just a few.
In the past few months I have learned a lot about myself. When the incident first occurred I was very angry. I know plenty of people that drink that are under age and they don’t get caught. I kept asking myself why me? At first I was hesitant to change, but the last few months have been eye opening. I have definitely used this situation to my advantage. There are so many things that I have learned about myself. I have used these last few months to really evaluate my life and set new goals for myself. I think this experience has greatly affected my life in more ways then one. I have done many things to change my life. I have seen changes in my personal life regarding my family and my friends. Many people talk about life changing experiences and how it affects them. I think that my life has changed for the good because of this incident. I’m glad that I have used this negative incident to better my life and to change the fate of my future.
student may not attend class the day after drinking because he or she may be
Weshler, Henry, and Wuethrich, Bernice. Dying to Drink: Confronting Binge Drinking on college campuses. Chicago: Rodale Inc., 2002. Print.
Binge Drinking is an intriguing phenomenon that many college students take part in all across the country. The issue of binge drinking has been a problem on college campuses for decades. Binge drinking has many horrible effects, but the problem starts with the causes for it. If the causes could be controlled then the issue would not get out of hand. Many college students give different causes for their drinking problems, and experts on the subject have their explanations as well. The problem is, while growing through adolescence anything can become an excuse for drinking, such as ¡§its Thursday the day before Friday, we need to drink¡¨ or, ¡§it¡¦s the last Wednesday of the semester, lets get some beer.¡¨
Binge or excessive drinking is the most serious problem affecting social life, health, and education on college campuses today. Binge or excessive drinking by college students has become a social phenomena in which college students do not acknowledge the health risks that are involved with their excessive drinking habits. Furthermore college students do not know enough about alcohol in general and what exactly it does to the body or they do not pay attention to the information given to them. There needs to be a complete saturation on the campus and surrounding areas, including businesses and the media, expressing how excessive drinking is not attractive and not socially accepted.
Most people do not realize that alcohol is a drug that claims the lives of youth in college campuses across the world. In my case, it took the encounter with the ORL staff at UCLA for me to come to understanding that I am putting myself and those around me in danger through my risky drinking habits. With hours of self-reflection and the help of a cosmopolitan article called The Deadly Drinking Mistakes Smart Girls Make, I have found that there are several risks associated with alcohol that can put me at a quarrel with death. Even so, drinking does not always need to be deadly, and by keeping in mind the well-being of my fellow bruins and the skills mentioned in the article, I can find a balance between drinking for fun and drinking till death.