Drinking at Universities and underage drinking are both huge problems going around in our society today. Young adults in colleges are unable to go to a social event without alcohol beverages being in there surroundings. An estimated of 63,718 deaths were attributable to harmful drinking in the U.S. in 2000. Of these deaths, 45,988 were to males (4 percent of all deaths among males) and 17,730 were to females(Washington News). Not only is this around the U.S but in our Universities. Death caused by drinking at a university is not a rare thing to witness now days. Everynight young men and women go out to experience the life of the party, the night life, they attend bars, clubs, lounges, pubs to absorb alcohol and have a good time with friends. You may ask yourself how could these children get into these type of social events and drink without being of legal age, well the answer is simple, fake ID's. According to the law possesion of fake identification is a Class C Misdemeanor, but yet there are still students trying to get one. Teens can find Fake ID's with just a few keystrokes on the web, this is because the demand for them are so high. Students are eager to get fake's to be able to participate or fit in.
Reading tonight on CNN I came across an article regarding University Drinking. Drury Univeristy in Springfield, MO has banned hard liquor on the campus to crackdown on binge drinking. This even banned the students of legal age from drinking any type of hard liquor on the school campus. Drury University has put two fraternities on suspension and made others do community service and pay fines. School is a place to learn and by passings this new rule Drury University is certainly going to have a lesser problem amoung the fraternity parties and other types of social events on campus. Students are beings killed and families are gettings hurt because of mass amounts of alcohol. SMU has had many deaths throughout the years and most of them were caused by alcohol. Last year at SMU in a six month time period three students passed away and two out of the three were being of alcohol while the other was caused by an overdose. This year just recently was not a student from SMU, but approximately two weeks ago a drunk driver injured five SMU students and also killed newlyweds. Untill this day I am puzzled for what the correct solution is to prevent all of these things from happening. Should more Universities take part in this rule or create there own in order to solve these drinking hazards?
http://www.kmbc.com/cnn-news/17544715/detail.html
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
It really is a serious problem. The thing that amazes me is the lengths people went to brew and consume alcohol during prohibition. Americans must have access to alcohol in order to live a content life? I wish that was not a serious question but it is...
In response to blogman - Although I am a moderate user of alcohol, I agree, that is a serious question, and I think for many the answer is yes. Many people rely on alcohol to socialize and have fun. People, especially college kids do not realize that such a reliance on a substance can lead to alcoholism and cause it to become more serious in the future. I have known many recovered alcoholics and they have said alcohol can lead to bad things.
Well, while I do agree that underage drinking is a problem, I don't think that banning hard alcohol is going to make a big difference. At SMU, a completely DRY campus, there is still an incredible amount of drinking that still goes on. The school has certain rules about their "dry campus policy" that allow people to step around the drinking restrictions but most of the time they just do it illegally because cops aren't watching everyone at every moment of the day. To be honest, I think that the only solution to this problem is to lower the drinking age to 18. Having the drinking age be set at 18 allows almost all college students to drink so nobody feels the need to drink an excessive amount before the go out knowing that they wont be able to get drinks at bars. Not only will it help in that way, but people wont feel the urge to drink as much. In Europe, they have a significantly milder problem with binge drinking with teens. Since drinking alcohol is taught to be seen as more of a delicacy and not as a way to alter one's brain, they don't have as high of a teen death rate due to alcohol poisoning. Making alcohol legal for 18 year old will only help the situation.
I feel like the people who decided to make campuses dry haven't thought from a teens point of view. It has ALWAYS been know that banning something from a teen makes them desire the object more.
Post a Comment