Quote:
Originally posted by 33girl
This whole country needs to rethink its puritanical attitude on alcohol.
We need to educate our children how to enjoy alcohol responsibly, how to know when you've had enough, and how not to use it as a badge of honor or coolness or what have you. We need to show our children that drinking is not a crime - no matter what the age - but drinking irresponsibly is. We need to do whatever it takes to remove the "forbidden fruit" aspect of alcohol. We need to educate on this as certainly as we educate kids on how to escape a burning building, how to avoid abduction and how to drive.
The "stay far far away from alcohol until you turn 21, and then automatically know what you're doing" obviously doesn't work. How much longer do we have to put up with it and how many more deaths have to happen before everyone realizes that our present system goes completely against a normal learning process for adolescents and young adults?
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EXACTLY. If universities and organizations enact more and tougher rules in response to these deaths, I think it's only going to make things worse.
These tragic events have nothing to do with the greek system, with universities, with bars (now some people in Boulder Colorado are trying to stop new liquor licenses from being issued near campus) or with anything that happens at school. The problems start well before that -- nobody drinks because he's in a fraternity, but I bet people who are more inclined to drink are more likely to join a fraternity (people seem to think that being in a fraternity causes drinking, but forget that correlation does not imply causation). Education about drinking should start at home before kids are even old enough to be thinking about college. It's unrealistic and -- really, deadly -- to send kids off to school with no idea how to control their drinking.