单项选择题

Fighting Binge Drinking On Campus It Takes a Village.

It’s no secret that binge drinking is a thriving extracurricular activity on most college campuses today--any frat (兄弟会) party or tailgate bash will show you that. For years, university administrations have vowed to crack down on the practice, but their efforts seem to consistently fall short, as evidenced by student deaths and booze-induced (痛饮诱发的)sexual-abuse crimes. Nearly half of college students binge-drink, meaning they have five or more drinks in one sitting with the intention of getting drunk, says the Core Institute, a Southern Illinois University group that administers national surveys and tracks alcohol use at colleges and universities. What’s worse, more than 1,800 students die each year in alcohol-related accidents--a number that is rising.
With alcohol abuse becoming more pervasive, do universities need to get tougher with existing policies, or do they simply need new ideas It’s a tricky problem, with no straight answer. But the consensus is that schools are less effective at combating the problem if they go it alone. What’s needed, say health experts and advocacy groups, is more help from the surrounding communities to penetrate the drinking culture from the outside in.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)first called for more campus- community partnerships in 2002, when it laid out a set of recommendations urging colleges to start communicating with external institutions such as the local police, bar owners, and alcohol distributors in order to combat the problem. The suggestions included straightforward tactics like raising local beer prices, training waiters and bartenders to spot fake IDs, lowering the blood-alcohol driving limit, increasing DUI checks, and requiring registrations for keg rentals.
But eight years later, there is mounting evidence that such partnerships are not being forged. In a new paper published in the October issue of the journal Alcoholism. Clinical and Experimental Research, researchers from the University of Minnesota discovered that many colleges and universities haven’t obey to those guidelines, despite being aware of their potential effectiveness.
"I continually heard comments from schools saying, ’We’re doing everything we can,’ "says Toben F. Nelson, a professor of epidemiology(流行病学)and community health and lead author of the study. "So we went back and checked if they were really doing the things with scientific backing behind it.And the answer was no." Nelson, who studied 350 colleges, concluded that most drinking takes place off campus, rather than in dorms where students are more likely to get caught. But off-campus isn’t where schools tend to get involved. Nelson found that very few colleges were engaged in anything beyond campus educational initiatives and policing regulations, which haven’t had much of an impact. "If anything, campus drinking problems are getting worse, despite the fact that we’re learning more and more about how to intervene and reduce it," says Ralph Hingson, director of the NIAAA’s Division of Epidemiology and Prevention Research.
The few schools that are forging partnerships are seeing results. In a new study published in the December issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that institutions that had joined forces with their municipalities saw on average 6,000 fewer incidents of intoxication (~ff-) at off-campus parties and 4,000 fewer bouts of public drunkenness at bars and restaurants. The study compared seven public universities in California that had forged partnerships with the local police with seven control schools that hadn’t.
According to Nelson, the most effective campus-community initiatives include raising the price of alcohol through taxes, banning drink specials, restricting the geographic density of alcohol distributors, and changing the laws to hold bar owners and other hosts more accountable for over-serving students. Public-health scholar Edward Ehlinger, who studies college-age youth, approves higher alcohol taxes as a way to dissuade cash-strapped students from having one too many. If prices remain low and marketing continues to court young people, overdosing on alcohol becomes a tough habit to break.
But any effort to tackle binge drinking solely on the college level would be futile, says Ehlinger. The only way to solve the problem--for any age grouts-is by dealing with it nationally. "The ability to raise the price of alcohol, put limits on marketing, and sever the tie between alcohol and sports is beyond what colleges can do," he says. "Only a broad community commitment to alcohol control will be effective in doing this."
Other solutions put equal emphasis on changing the national culture, but take the opposite tack. Barrett Seaman, the author of Binge. Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess, suggests loosening alcohol restrictions altogether. Simply policing the problem at school hasn’t worked because the drinking tends to move off campus, where it’s easier to hide booze. "When administrations try to crack down, they drive drinking underground, like Prohibition," says Seaman, who researched his book while living on 12 different college campuses. In it he compares Dartmouth College, where 200 undergrads (out of 4,400)were hospitalized for alcohol overdoses in 2003, with McGill University, which had a minuscule 12 alcohol-related hospitalizations (out of a whopping 20,000 students)over a two-year period. One major difference: Montreal-based McGill has a drinking age of only 18, whereas Dartmouth has the over-21 age restriction.
It’s hard to tell whether campus drinking has worsened over the last several decades , but some, like Seaman, believe the 1984 law that increased the drinking-age limit from 18 to 21 actually made college bingeing more prevalent. That law went into effect in response to a spike in the number of alcohol-related highway fatalities, but even the person who helped usher in the higher age limit, Morris Chafetz, NIAAA founder and President Ronald Reagan’s appointee to the Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving, announced last year that it has not worked. Seaman and others continue to circulate a petition to lower the drinking age back to 18. Already, 135 college chancellors and presidents have signed it, according to the sponsor, Amethyst Initiative.
Lowering the drinking age, says Seaman, would bring drinking "out of the closet," eliminating some of the need to pregame, or drink in dorms before going out; it would allow colleges to regulate when and where drinking could occur. Seaman even envisions professors playing a role. "I think any student would tell you," he says, "that they would moderate their drinking if the same professor who was going to be grading them at the end of the semester was in the room."
Many health experts believe Seaman’s take is naive--wouldn’t teenagers continue to prcgame for economic reasons What’s more, lowering the drinking age has an obvious appeal for students. "Drinking is part of the social fabric in college," says Ben, a senior from the University of Virginia, who asked that his full name not be used. He recalls a night earlier this year when he was underage and drank beer, rum, and vodka at a friend’s apartment before walking into a bar, having one drink and blacking out. He spent that night in jail. "If you know you can’t drink in public, you have to drink more in private."
Still, forcing drinking out in the open won’t solve all the campus problems, and only time will tell if the campus-community partnerships will work. Colleges will undoubtedly run into establishments that are unwilling to cooperate if it means a plunge in sales. Scholars at Indiana University recently completed a study assessing alcohol interventions, and lead researcher Dong-Chul Seo reported that local beer distributors and restaurant owners were not receptive to meetings.

Edward Ehlinger deems that the way to prevent impoverished students from drinking too much alcohol is（）.

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