Drinking is an individual choice but when the spill-over affects the quality of life for the campus community, it becomes everyone’s problem. It’s like a secondhand hangover.

for the drinker range from subtle to criminal. The subtleties may begin by behaving in any remorseful or harmful way. Unintended or unprotected sex. From an academic standpoint: missing courses, grades suffering, flunking classes or dropping out altogether. Criminal: Drunk driving. wrecks and arrests. At a health level: Emergency room admissions from alcohol poisoning, seizures, needless injuries from drunken accidents of all sorts even death.


For the person affected by someone else’s drinking it ranges from having to care-take a drunk friend, roommate or neighbor. Having sleep or studies interrupted by obnoxious drunkenness, or being a victim of an alcohol-related crime (from vandalism and theft to rape and homicide)

Having said all that, it’s still the minority of students that drink excessively. Yet for far too long, standards of behavior for all students have been shaped by those students who do over indulge.

Going off to college involves many rites of passage. For some it’s cutting loose the apron strings from Mom for the first time, learning to balance a checkbook, cook and losing your virginity. But drinking to the point of oblivion, or having to endure the consequences of someone else’s drinking, need not and shouldn’t have to be part of campus life.

In the past it’s been college administrators setting policy for high-risk drinking and substance abuse prevention will little affect. In growing numbers across the country students are questioning the corrosive and degrading influence of binge drinking on the quality of college life. And it is this very active student role that seems to be making a difference.

Quite to the contrary. More like very uncool, idiotic and unacceptable. Students set out to make a difference are redefining what’s fun and what acceptable behavior for a positive college experience. Rather than apathetically turning their heads the other way, students are turning up in record numbers to advocate for change.

e-mail us thoughts, experiences and ideas to help create change for the better.