
One college town's uneasy embrace of drinking - Thevet
http://chronicle.com/article/A-River-of-Booze/150221
======
HarryHirsch
_She runs “bartending school” for incoming students during mandatory
orientation sessions at Georgia. Handing over a vodka bottle full of water,
she asks them to pour what they think is one drink into a 16-ounce cup. After
a discussion of alcohol’s physical effects and consequences, she empties the
cups into two-ounce shot glasses. What seemed like one drink is often two or
three._

In normal countries, teenagers start drinking in a supervised environment
(read: Mom and Dad, who won't appreciate that Sonny threw up in his shoe
_again_ because he came home way too sozzled to find the toilet bowl), and
they start on beer and wine, which makes it much more difficult to overdose.
In America the infantilized teenagers go off to college and then proceed to
black out on spirits, because spirits are easier to smuggle into the dorm.
What could possibly go wrong there?

Also: the American problem of trying to get on top of alcohol abuse by
limiting availability, when you would rather limit damage and trust peoples'
responsibility. Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk
drivers? It would increase road safety so much.

~~~
robrenaud
> Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk drivers? It would
> increase road safety so much.

Research suggests that you might be wrong.

[http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/twitter-politics-
drunken-...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/twitter-politics-drunken-
driving-and-tax-deductions/)

> Key quote: “Harsher sanctions to drinking and driving may generate no
> marginal deterrent effect if drivers’ perceived risks of receiving the
> punishments are low. Therefore, rather than escalating sanction severity,
> increasing the probability of detection and/or enforcement may be more
> effective in reducing drinking and driving.”

~~~
math0ne
This is a purely anecdotal response but I live in Texas now and come from
Canada where the punishments for drunk driving are very severe. In short I am
absolutely floored by the casual nature of drunk driving here, across all
segments of society compared to Canada.

In Canada my very alternative friends to whom casual law breaking like illegal
drinking and drugs would be nothing, would almost universally never consider
drinking and driving.

In the US those same type of friends seeming drink and drive 5-6 days a week,
often after consuming amounts of alcohol I consider ridiculous. Additionally I
regularly interact with professionals and even professors who drink and drive.

This is purely my opinion, but the difference I experience here is outa
control when it comes to drinking and driving and I do think the harsh
punishments have something to do with it.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Texas is not realy the USA, they don't like much law and taxes. Most states
come down hard on drinking and driving.

~~~
jessaustin
_Texas is not realy the USA..._

An attractive sentiment in general, but it's not true. Texas is just like
every other state, in that they spend way too much on the "enforcement" of
drunk-driving laws. The reason is obvious: local police and sheriffs get the
same ridiculous federal grants that LEOs in all other states get.

EDIT: Congratulations to Louisiana, I expect they laugh at Texas' patchwork of
dry and "partially-moist" counties.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Louisiana back in the 80s/early 90s had very lax drinking laws: the drinking
age was 18 and they had "drive thru" daiquiri stores. I think they gave that
up for highway money, but the culture still hangs around.

In contrast, many states in the north are now zero tolerance states. The limit
is quite low, and the penalties are quite harsh. Well, that pales in
comparison to Japan, where you would probably lose your job if caught (and
they have a very low limit also).

~~~
selimthegrim
Indeed, Louisiana still has drive thru daiquiri places. They just put a piece
of tape over the straw hole in the lid as they hand it to you.

------
wwwwwwwwww
Overdrinking is a problem that I only think is going to get worse until
there's some serious changes made to how drinking is treated legally.

When I was in college, I was a part of my fraternity's "risk management" team,
a group of brothers whose only job is to stay sober during parties, find
people who had drunk too much or more commonly people who had completely
blacked out and hush them off away from the alcohol or to a safe part of the
house where they could be watched for signs of alcohol poisoning and kept safe
from being taken advantage of.

If there's any one trend I've noticed while I worked risk management at those
parties, it was that the more taboo it is to drink alcohol, the more that
people binge drink it. It's always the students whose parents were the most
uptight about drinking or those who couldn't purchase alcohol yet who were the
biggest binge drinkers and most common to pass out. There was one period
during which there was a university crackdown on drinking at fraternity
parties, and the most noticeable thing during the crackdown was that people
would drink a -lot- more.

The amazing part about it was when people turned 21, it was like they became
seasoned drinkers over night. People who had problems pacing themselves during
every party would instantly turn into a moderate drinker once their 21st had
passed.

I think it would be very interesting to see some studies done on the taboo of
drinking and whether it changes people's likelihood to overdrink, because it
seemed with every crackdown measure the local police force took against
drinking at parties, the problem only got worse.

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
The solution to this is to start drinking beers with your kids at age 10. This
way drinking will be the most uncool thing ever, and they'll grow up to be
teetotalers.

Seriously though, we need a culture change. You can't tell them they can never
drink, then turn them loose in another city by themselves and expect it to not
be taken to extremes. That's pretty dumb.

~~~
anigbrowl
This is actually allowed in some states. There's doesn't seem to be any
particular pattern to which states allow it and which don't, eg
stereotypically liberal California has the same ultra-strict requirements as
stereotypically conservative Kentucky. Here's a neat summary of the different
exceptions to the 21-year minimum age rule, broken out by state.

[http://drinkingage.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...](http://drinkingage.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=002591)

~~~
jessaustin
_3\. for religious purposes in 26 states_

Haha, I guess all the Catholic churches in the other 24 states will get raided
next time they have a First Communion. This is just one example of how
unreliable these sorts of comparisons are.

~~~
anigbrowl
Not necessarily. When I was growing up in Catholic Ireland we used to eat the
communion wafer but only the priest drank the wine - more because it would
have been impractical to serve to hundreds of people than any other reason,
but also partly from hygiene considerations. I asked our priest about it once
(I was an alter boy) and his response was that it was just too much hassle and
they were glad to abandon the practice. Back then churches used to be packed 4
times a day on Sundays so I can see how it would be a headache. I used to get
hand cramps from holding the little metal plate under people's chins to
prevent the communion wafer falling on the floor.

~~~
cafard
Between the Council of Trent and about 1970, the Roman Catholic laity took
communion in one kind only, and the chalice was reserved to the priests.

~~~
anigbrowl
Interesting! They kept that up for a long time afterwards in Ireland, at least
to the late 1980s (which was when I stopped going to church). I've
occasionally been to a Catholic church in the US (weddings, funerals although
I'm an atheist now) and it was quite disorienting to be offered the wine at
Communion.

~~~
jessaustin
I'm similarly apostate, and I'm quite sure you're not welcome in the communion
line as an atheist.

------
mlrtime
"Even going to the tape, though, is not always enough. The mother of the guy
in the Santa suit maintained that the police should’ve taken her son, who
eventually passed out, back to his room, not to jail. Recounting the story,
Mr. Williamson looks momentarily exasperated. He tried to explain, he says,
that her son was safer sleeping off his drunkenness under supervision."

It seems the LEOs cannot win when dealing with a mother who 'knows best'

~~~
cowardlydragon
Well, considering he's one of the three people arrested per weekend out of
"thousands"... it's arbitrary and ineffective.

~~~
mmanfrin
Three people arrested for doing things considered over the top (e.g. passed
out on a park bench, breaking in to a dorm of the opposite sex) out of
thousands _of drinkers_ \-- who they do not enforce drinking laws on.

------
basseq
I went to UGA my freshman year. Compared to other campuses where the parties
are at fraternities or private residences, Athens is a bar (and, as the
article points out, a fake ID) town.

It was very much a wink-and-grin environment: the "bad photocopy job pasted
onto a McDonald's gift card" description is very apt. Some bars were tougher
than others, but for a guy, showing up with a favorable distribution of girls
would cause the bouncer to look the other way.

It's obvious and egregious (UGA suspends open container laws on gamedays), but
as the article's subjects and other HN posters point out, the problem is not
bars and fake IDs, and more college students' drinking problems. (Which exist
at fraternities, house parties, and other venues as well.) To that end, I laud
the focus on safety, education, and one-strikes over just pushing the "scene"
underground.

~~~
cyanbane
(Re open container suspension) A few years ago I paid a $280 fine for walking
an open beer across the street in Athens. To this article's point I think the
cops pick and choose as to where they may be most effective at a given point
in the day, the beer didn't have a label on it (I brewed it) and the cop may
have thought it looked odd.

Although the town has stayed the same since my years in Athens, I do think
there is an uptick in underage drinking in general, or at the least a larger
movement to drinking harder spirits. Personally, I think there is a larger
mention of liquor by name in today's music than there has been in the past and
that plays a part.

------
cafard
Until the beginning of the 1980s, 18-year-olds could drink at least beer in
most states. In New York they could drink hard liquor, in Colorado 3.2 beer,
for example. Then the Reagan Administration decided that stopping under-21
drinking would reduce traffic deaths as much as mandatory airbags. States that
did not raise the drinking age would lose highway funds. By the mid-1980s, the
drinking age was 21 pretty much everywhere.

