A recent multimedia piece in The Echo profiled the weekend morning grounds crew. It showed the disgusting aftermath of a weekend night in the townhouses, and profiled the people who clean up after us so that we can all pretend our collective Friday night binge leaves no ill effects. Any reasonable member of the St. Mike's community wants that kind of destructive behavior to stop, but in my four years here, little to no progress has been made in moving the campus drinking culture toward something resembling "responsible."
We, as a campus community, should pressure our leaders to lower the legal drinking age to 18. This act would eliminate much of the motivation for unhealthy drinking on our campus.
The non-profit group Choose Responsibility recently launched Get REAL, a campaign aimed at bringing together student government leaders to encourage responsibility, education, and leadership on alcohol issues at campuses nationwide. The campaign asks students to commit to drinking in a responsible manner, college administrators to provide a safer campus environment and more realistic alcohol education, and political leaders to consider alternatives to the current legal drinking age of 21. Consider this a public request for our student government leaders to join the cause.
The simple truth is that current alcohol policies at St. Michael's have done nothing to curb alcohol abuse on this campus. Even with the looming threats of being sent to ACT1 for a night or banished to Senior Hall for a weekend, unhealthy binge drinking still happens among students, underage and of legal age alike. In reality, current alcohol policies encourage underage students to drink highly alcoholic drinks as fast as possible so that security/police/Student Life won't find anything to bust them for. This, of course, is also the most dangerous way to drink and contributes to most of the alcohol problems on this campus.
Events like Friday Night Dry don't help matters either. We’re given a condescending message from college officials that stigmatizes all drinking--even if it's done responsibly and moderately. That stigma only increases the motivation for students to binge drink, again, in covert.
An 18-year-old drinking age would allow college campuses like this one to provide open, public spaces for drinking. Students would no longer have to hide their drinking, or drink massive amounts in a short time. A more relaxed atmosphere, where students can drink without fear of getting in trouble, would cut down on many of the dangerous drinking behaviors we see now. Of course it wouldn't eliminate binge drinking and its associated effects, but it would allow campus authorities to focus more attention on people who are actually being destructive, instead of wasting time writing up an otherwise well-behaved student just for carrying a 12-pack up a stairwell in Lyons.
Additionally, allowing young adults to drink at an earlier age would cut down on the rebellious allure that underage drinking currently provides. Let's face it: having the drinking age at 21 does nothing to keep alcohol out of the hands of 18 to 20-year-olds, and has done nothing to cut down on alcohol-related deaths and injuries in that age group. It's only added a stigma of "forbiddenness" that encourages binge drinking among underage people. Giving people the ability to consume alcohol at an earlier age would encourage mature, responsible drinking, and would reduce the numbers of people binge drinking out of rebellion or to avoid repercussions.
However, it has to be said that if we want a lower drinking age, we the students must take more responsibility ourselves, and not just complain to college and political leaders. The way students act here after a few drinks is a ringing endorsement to bring back Prohibition, not to make the drinking age fairer. We all want to be able to drink legally at age 18, but to attain that goal we'll have to show the outside world that people our age can drink responsibly, without hurting others, trashing our campus, or being generally obnoxious and immature.
Everyone has to shoulder some of the blame for the toxic drinking culture on this and other campuses. To create an environment of responsible drinking and ensure fairness in alcohol policies nationwide and at home, we all have to work together.
