Audrey Reed
A&E Editor
Ben Young / Photo Editor
Some consider it a college rite of passage, others a terrible and possibly fatal way to spend a Friday night.
Drinking on college campuses has caught the attention of the public and school administrators nationwide most recently through alcohol-related deaths of five college students. Also, last week was National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week. Activities on Pepperdine’s campus included a lecture by a former police officer, the MADD car-crash display and distribution of Pepperdine’s changes to alcohol policies.
According to Harvard University’s College and Alcohol Survey, which surveyed students nationwide, 44 percent of college students are classified as binge drinkers, or those who drink more than five drinks for men and four drinks for women in a row.
In the most recent Pepperdine alcohol survey in the spring of 2003, one out of four Pepperdine students are classified as binge drinkers. The survey, administered through the office of Planning Assessment and Institutional Research, is based on 22 percent of the student body.
Even though Pepperdine is a dry campus and has a comparably lower drinking average than the national average, it is not exempt from the temptations of alcohol.
Nicole, whose name has been changed, is a 21-year-old senior who decided last summer to stop “getting wasted” and instead to only drink in moderation when she became legally able to drink after almost four years of heavy alcohol use.
“Drinking was a part of my life,” said Nicole. “I realized that every day when I woke up my favorite thing to think about was ‘I get to party tonight.’”
When Nicole was drinking heavily, she drank five times a week, averaging about seven servings of hard alcohol or 10 to 12 beers each night.
“My parents sat me down and said, ‘Do you have a drinking problem? And if you do, you need to talk to us about it. We can get you help,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘What? I don’t have a drinking problem.’ But when I wake up in the mornings and what I can’t wait to do is party, I think that’s a problem.”
Her choice to stop binge drinking was a hard one, she said, affecting many of her friendships.
“I have friends from last year at Pepperdine that I hung out with every single day,” she said. “And now I rarely talk to them at all. Then, when I went home this summer, my friends from home treated me differently at first and gave me a really hard time about it.”
These situations contributed to her lapse.
“When I first got home, everyone was giving me such a hard time,” she said. “I fell to peer pressure, and the next day I felt terrible. Everything I had worked so hard for I just threw away because of the way people perceive me.”
Part of the reason she decided to quit drinking heavily was because she realized her goals were not met by living that type of lifestyle. The other part was her Christian faith.
“If you are a Christian or in a relationship with God, then you have to really think hard about what you are and what you are doing to your relationship,” she said. “If you are doing something that is tearing you away from your faith, then you are consciously making a decision to sin.”
Sophomore Jennifer Lowe said she also uses her faith as part of her reason to abstain from drinking alcohoL, as well as her upbringing and the law.
“Drinking is a way people hide who they really are,” she said. “I don’t need to drink to show who I really am.”
However, not all Pepperdine students share Nicole and Lowe’s views on drinking. A junior and 21-year-old who chose to speak to the Graphic on condition of anonymity estimated that he drinks a liter of alcohol spread over an average of four nights each week.
“We probably go through a couple of handles (of alcohol) a week between the four of us,” he said of himself and his roommates. “We like to be wild, or whatever, and cut loose sometimes to not worry about school.”
He said drinking doesn’t conflict with school or his plans after college.
“I don’t do it every night, and I keep it separate,” he said. “I don’t go to class drunk. I’m sure I’ll be more responsible later. I won’t be getting drunk every weekend.”
He said he has gotten sick a few times from alcohol, but doesn’t worry about it affecting his health.
“Even when I am drinking those four nights a week, it’s not ‘Let’s get as trashed as possible,’” he said. “I rarely ever do that. I’ve read stuff on how moderate amounts of alcohol are not really that bad for you.”
But drinking can be very unhealthy, said Rhonda Scott-Harris, the wellness and health promotions coordinator at Pepperdine.
“The body can only tolerate one alcoholic beverage per hour,” she said. “People are drinking really big bottles of beer and it counts as more.”
While Scott-Harris does not advocate that students drink at all, there are certain things to be done to make alcohol consumption easier on the body. Besides consuming only one drink an hour to allow time for the liver to detoxify the alcohol, drinking with a full stomach, not mixing alcohol with carbonated beverages and not eating salty foods while drinking will slow the alcohol in the bloodstream.
While Nicole has quit drinking for shorter periods of time, this four-month period has been the longest she has been careful about how much she drinks.
“It’s really hard, but it has to be something you are willing to make a commitment to,” she said. “You have to make a change. You have to make different friends. You have to not put yourself in a situation where you know you are going to fail.”
Pepperdine Policy
Two major changes occurred over the summer to Pepperdine’s alcohol policy, and there may be more to come.
For the 2004 fall semester, the student handbook added two paragraphs to the alcohol policy, both giving immunity to people in alcohol-related incidences under “rare circumstances,” Dean of Students Mark Davis said.
The first is the Good Samaritan rule that says if a person is trying to help another who has had a fatal amount to drink, the “Good Samaritan” cannot be put on probation, even if he or she were drinking as well.
The second applies to reporting sexual assault. If alcohol was involved in the incident, the reporting party will not face probation. In both additions, parties may be given alcohol educational research to complete.
A student committee comprised of nine SGA senators will continue the effort to update the student handbook policies. The group will begin by picking out trouble areas and then will survey the student body.
“We are going to read through it and look at policies that don’t reflect the needs of students, or things that we feel need a little bit of tweaking,” said Jessica Eisenriech, senior senator and head of the student committee. “We want this to be a safe environment where (students) feel that their needs are being looked out for above some rules.”
Particular to alcohol, the rules that pertain to students who come back to school drunk and are the designated drivers for drunk students will be examined.
“What we are concerned about in regards to the handbook is making sure that Pepperdine’s rules and policies don’t go so far where students are afraid when they do mess up to get the help they need,” Eisenriech said.
Besides changing the student handbook rules, last year Pepperdine wrote the Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Prevention Plan, which outlines what the university is currently doing and ideas about what they can do in the future to prevent alcohol and drug abuse.
Events like last week’s National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week and utilizing AlcoholEdu, an online educational course on alcohol, for alcohol violations are part of the existing plan.
However, the university is looking at making AlcoholEdu mandatory for all freshman. This year students in 12 freshman seminars are taking the online course, and then all freshman seminars will take a post-test. Those students who took the course will be compared to those who did not. Depending on the results of the study and the expense of the program the university may incorporate AlcoholEdu into the curriculum, Davis said.
The surveys showing low amounts of binge drinking won’t stop Pepperdine’s alcohol prevention strategies.
“We are realistic. There’s no way on a college campus, I don’t care which college campus, that drinking is going to be at zero,” Davis said. “However, while I am very happy we are below the national average, just look at those numbers and think that they aren’t statistics, but lives.
“If you look at the drinking and driving statistics, great we are below the national average, but I don’t care if that’s 200 or five people out there drinking and driving, I’m concerned for their safety and the risk that they put other people in our community in,” Davis said. “And so, we are still going to do everything we can.”
10-28-2004