Drunkenness at college makes sober students suffer: Survey
By B. C. Coleman - AP Medical Writer (12/7/94)

Chicago - Binge drinking is rampant on almost a third of the nation's campuses-and where it prevails, sober students suffer, a survey found.

"Students on campuses where there's a lot of binge drinking are affected in a number of ways-including physical assault, sexual harassment, property damage and interrupted sleep or study time," said Henry Wechsler, director of the Alcohol Studies Program at the Harvard School of Public Health.

His team surveyed 17,592 students on 140 campuses last year. Findings appear in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Forty-four percent of students reported bingeing, defined as downing five drinks or beers in a row for men or four in a row for women at least once in the two weeks before the survey.

Nineteen percent of all students were frequent bingers - having at least three binges in the period. The five or four drinks did not have to be consumed within a specific time period to qualify as bingeing.

Bingers tend to drink for the express purpose of getting drunk, Wechsler said.

Jacob Talbott knows the type. The freshman at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale said off campus bars that lure students with discounted pitchers of beer only make matters worse.

"They've got all those specials at the bars on weekdays, so that's when everybody goes," Talbott said.

"They'll come in (the dorm) at 2 or 3 in the morning, and maybe I'm actually trying to get to bed early that night," he said. "They'll be running up and down the halls and stuff. Then I can't get to sleep. If I've got a 9 or 10 o'clock class the next day, I'm not very happy."

Bingers were seven times as likely to have unprotected sex as non-binge drinkers, 10 times as likely to drive after drinking and 11 times as likely to fall behind in their studies, the survey said.

At about one-third of the schools, more than 50% of students surveyed were bingers. At another third, fewer than 35% were bingers. The survey did not identify particular schools.

Sober students at the heavy drinking schools were much more likely to endure abuse from drinking students than teetotalers at the lowest-level drinking schools.

At the heavy-drinking schools, sober students were more than twice as likely to be insulted, hit, assaulted or experience unwanted sexual advances from drinking students.

They were also about 2.5 times as likely to have their study or sleep interrupted or their property damaged by drinkers, the survey said.

Katharine C. Lyall, president of UW-System and chair of the advisory board for the Harvard study, said orientation and counseling programs aimed at binge drinkers at her schools have been largely unsuccessful.

"I increasingly encounter students who comment they have a roommate whose drinking interferes with their study time," Lyall said. "Or that they were out on Saturday ... with a friend who got so drunk they got sick and ruined everybody's evening."