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I am not playing Devil's advocate at all.
All of our groups now have comprehensive alcohol awareness programs that get disseminated to one degree or another.
Almost every campus with Greek Organizations have Greeks putting on seminars about it.
Almost every College in the Nation has mandatory alcohol programming now.
Where I differ is in the framing of the situation.
This is a social issue, a social pattern that has been isolated our of normal life and defined as a problem.
Kind of like taking a snap-shot of part of an event and saying that is the problem independant of the rest of the scenario.
Now alcohol has become a buzzword much like Hazing which we discussed earlier. And it becomes very vague what we are actually talking about.
Everyone agrees that binge drinking is wrong, until we start defining binge drinking. At my weight I am barely catching a buzz off 5 drinks in one evening which is the definition of binge drinking.
High Risk drinking can lead to problems. But what is high risk drinking?
The way this issue has been framed is much like the way we were sold a war on Iraq. Its been framed through sets of inferences without clear definition.
For example. If someone just reads through that article it looks like the average college student is engaging in high risking drinking twice a week.
Because the article doesn't define abstainers, it makes it appear lthat 50 percent of students come to school opposed to drinking and then most of them get seduced into a drinking culture.
IT doesn't take into account that alcohol may be more readily available in college than high school.
We can invent new variations of these programs all the time, but until we really agree on the definitions of what we are talking about its going to be really hard to measure any impact these programs might be having or whether they are necessary.
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