Soc, psych, phil and a six pack; biology and a Bailey's. Are college students hitting the books as hard as the bars?
Nobody doubts that having an occasional beer is an acceptable (even inevitable) part of student life, but is getting tanked, sloshed or blotto becoming as common as flasks at a football game?
In recent years, surveys have shown that binge drinking (having five or more drinks at a single occasion) is a growing concern on campuses. In British Columbia, 73% of students at two universities admitted to activities that led to binge drinking, while a wider campus survey of students from 40 Canadian universities revealed that a majority of students drank and that one-third of them admitted to occasional binge drinking.
"It's important for people to know the risks involved in a binge drinking pattern," says Dr. Robert Mann, a senior scientist at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH.) Hazardous drinking can lead to injury, he says.
"Drinking and driving is one of the leading causes of death in the late teen years. Drinking is also a factor in violence, suicide and unwanted or unplanned sex."
Research by Marlon Mundt of the University of Wisconsin-Madison showed that, in 2001, more than 1,700 U.S. college students died from alcohol-related injuries. Further studies on binge drinkers showed that males who drank more than eight drinks or females who drank more than five drinks on at least four days per month (for example, every weekend) were five times more likely to be injured than those who did not frequently cross this limit.
While Canadian campuses have increasingly addressed the issue of binge drinking on campus by trying to educate students and working with campus pubs, Mann is convinced that the most effective kinds of prevention are policy-based measures combined with education.
"In the U.S., for example, we know that since they raised the drinking age to 21 they have prevented over 20,000 driving fatalities."
Keeping in touch with university-aged children who live away from home is important, he says.
