Do you drink too much?
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Many college students drink—a lot. In 2008 the
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse
(CASA) at Columbia University found that 44 percent of
college students were binge-drinkers and that nearly
one in four fulfilled the medical criteria for substance
abuse. In 2010 the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse
and Alcoholism reported that alcohol annually caused
nearly 100,000 sexual assaults and date rapes and 1,700
deaths of college students.
“It’s time to get the ‘high’ out of higher education,”declared Joseph A. Califano, president of CASA and for-
mer U.S. secretary of health, education, and welfare. He
blamed college administrators for condoning a “college
culture of abuse.” Campaigns to promote responsible
drinking accomplished little, he noted. The only effective
strategy was campus-wide prohibition.
But such words caused many to bristle. In 2010, after
Iowa City banned those under twenty-one from bars, the
Daily Iowanat the University of Iowa claimed that
“harsh restrictions on alcohol drive the behavior under-
ground, pushing young people to use more hard liquor
in unsupervised private house parties.” “Let’s not repack-
age the Prohibition Era of the 1920s,” the article con-
cluded. When the University of Hawaii considered