Tonight is "Thirsty Thursday" at Radford University. Pledges at Tau Kappa Epsilon are metting at the off-campus fraternity house on Calhoun Street for "Big Brother Reveal." They'll be meeting their mentors for the coming pledge season.
One of the pledges is 20-year-old Sam Mason. As candles flicker in a darkened attic, Sam is introduced to his new big brother, who hands him a fifth of Crown Royal whiskey. It's a tradition, you see. In about 20 minutes, Sam has drained the bottle. A frat brother says, "You need to get sick now."
But Sam doesn't get sick. Not yet. Instead, he walks with friends to a nearby house party and then to an off-campus apartment on Fairfax Street, where he finally passes out. He's carried to an empty bedroom to sleep it off. There, at some point during the night, he vomits.
The next morning, Sam Mason is found dead. The medical examiner will later reveal that he died of "acute ethanol poisoning." The blood alcohol level in his lifeless body is .48 percent—six times the level at which a person can be busted for drunk driving.
"I don't know how we haven't had more of these cases," says Chris Rehak, the prosecutor who investigated Sam's death and was prepared to bring manslaughter charges against seven TKEs. Six later pleaded guilty to lesser offenses, and charges against a seventh were dropped when he helped investigators. "Nobody knows when to say when."
On a national level, cases liek these have indeed been on the rise. In 2008 alone, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), some 29,000 young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 were admitted to hospitals for alcohol overdoses—up 25 percent in a decade. (Overdoses from combining alcohol and drugs accounted for another 29,000 hospitalizations—a 76 percent jump from 1999.) And here's a morbid number limited to just college students: Every year roughly 1,825 of them die of some sort of injury related to drinking too much booze, including a few hundred who die of acute ethanol poisoning. This is the dark side of binge drinking, which for men is defined as having five or more drinks in 2 hours.
The stereotypical young binge drinker is a white male college student who belongs to a fraternity. In other words, he's a guy like Sam Mason. In fact, college students tend to drink more heavily than nonstudents (80 percent of college students drink, and half of those drinkers do some bingeing). Heavy drinkers are more likely to be white than African American. They are more likely to be men and are also more likely to be members of fraternities or sports teams. Some of the most physically fit guys on campus are among the most likely to put their health at risk.
So there's something to the Animal House image. But you could padlock the doors of every frat house in America and the situation wouldn't change much. Alcohol is virtually synonymous with the college experience. And binge drinking starts before college. You can't blame colleges for the fact that most teenagers—more than 70 percent of high school students, in fact—have experimented with alcohol.
These scary numbers may mislead some people into believing that drinking on campus is on the rise. Actually, it is not. "The number of young people who drink is going down, both in high school and, to a lesser extent, college," says Aaron M. White, Ph.D., who oversees the NIAAA research funds for the study of underage and college drinking. "But it does appear that more students are drinking to extremes." There aren't more students drinking; instead, those who drink are drinking more.
Five drinks is a binge? Get real. As a professor at Temple University, I know different. Of male students who binge, 24 percent report having had 10 or more drinks in a row. And that's if they know how much they imbibed. "Many college students have not been taught what a serving is," says White. "They tend to underestimate how much they drink."
They also tend to underestimate alcohol's ability to kill.
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