Photo Illustration By J. Matthew Root

It's spring break in Cancun, Mexico. An 18-year-old high school graduate, going by the name King James, is holding court at the pool bar. He's been drinking shots of tequila since early morning. It's now early evening and he's beyond slurring; he's actually forgotten how to speak English. Later on, he'll try stumbling down to Señor Frogs in search of girls gone wild. What he'd find, if he made it, would be girls puking in the bathroom. He doesn't make it, though. Instead he falls over a hedge.

Back in the U.S., bingeing is more likely to occur behind the locked doors of college dorm rooms, because the drinking age has made it harder for people under 21 to drink themselves into a public stupor. Without supervision, students are knocking back shots so fast that a drinking session often ends in an ambulance. That worries college administrators, who say they can't control what they can't see, and the drinking age has made binge drinking an invisible epidemic.

Last weekend, college students arrived on campuses with cars stuffed to overflowing and some brought along survival kits including bottles of booze pilfered from their parents. They met their new roommates and endured lectures from their resident advisors on the dangers of drinking.

Despite the obligatory alcohol education courses, University of New Haven President Stephen Kaplan says about half of all students will get drunk over the next several weeks. Although he's quick to note that 30 percent of University of New Haven students don't drink at all, he's the first to admit that "binge drinking is a serious and dangerous social problem."

American campuses have put up a good fight against underage drinking. Now many college leaders say it's time to try a new tactic because it's a battle they're losing. Drinking on campus, particularly the binge drinking that is more likely to lead to alcohol poisoning, remains a persistent problem.

Some 128 college and university presidents have signed onto the Amethyst Initiative, a proposal launched by former Middlebury College president and Choose Responsibility founder John McCardell that calls for "an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21-year-old drinking age."

Six Connecticut presidents have signed the Initiative: the University of New Haven's Steven H. Kaplan, Fairfield University's Jeffrey von Arx, Mitchell College's Mary Ellen Jukoski, Saint Joseph College's Pamela Trotman Reid, Trinity College's James F. Jones, Jr., and University of Hartford's Walter Harrison.

The initiative signatories got a big splash in the media, but less attention has been paid to research studies that indicate binge drinking won't be stopped by lowering the drinking age. Some reports say that community-wide efforts can do more than changes to the law.

An Educational Mission?

The 1984 Minimum Drinking Age Act withheld 10 percent of highway funds from states that didn't raise the drinking age to 21. The Amethyst Initiative asks lawmakers to reconsider that approach to give states more freedom to set their own drinking ages. As the transportation bill comes up for reauthorization in 2009, it's a timely debate and one that some college presidents hope will give them greater opportunities to educate students about how to drink responsibly.

"In general, alcohol education asserts abstinence in order to be compliant with the law," says Mary Ellen Jukoski, president of New London's Mitchell College, a dry campus. "This has not produced constructive behavioral change among young people. In fact it may contribute to dangerous binge drinking behaviors."

Some presidents signed on because they've seen binge drinking up close. "I was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania when a young woman, due to overdrinking, fell out a dorm window," says St. Joseph College President Pamela Trotman Reid. "It's time to have a conversation about what abuses are, what responsibility is, and to try to bring some rationality [to drinking] and not make it like an adventure."

Trinity College President James Jones Jr. vividly remembers an alcohol-fueled tragedy involving two freshmen, one 17, the other 18, when he was dean of faculty at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. After downing 10 or more shots of vodka to get drunk before a concert, they decided to break into an elevator shaft and jump from one moving elevator to the other. "It's called 'elevator surfing,'" says Jones. One student survived, the other did not.

Initiative supporters point out that at 18, people are considered adults. They can sign contracts, get married, join the military, serve on a jury, and vote. They say it doesn't make sense that those same people can't drink legally. Opponents point out that raising the drinking age has saved lives, and the research backs up their claims that alcohol-related traffic accidents involving teens decreased dramatically when states raised the drinking age to 21.

College presidents who signed the petition have been sharply criticized by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), which labeled the institutions "party schools" and urged parents to keep their children away. Under pressure, several colleges have withdrawn their support for the initiative.

"All of us have been bombarded by the same e-mail message, which is an orchestrated move on the part of MADD to complain about the stance we're trying to take about the present law," says Jones. "I moved it all to delete. Most of us simply believe that the fact that one cannot drink before 21 simply encourages clandestine behavior."

Fighting Words

"I see it as a modern Prohibition," says 19-year-old Tim Stiefler, a Trinity sophomore from San Diego, Calif. "You can [volunteer] to go to war at 18 but you can't get a fucking beer until you're 21? It's absurd."

Research shows it's not so absurd. One study found that binge drinking, at the high school level at least, has declined by about a third from 41.2 percent in 1980 (when the legal age was 18) to 27.9 percent in 2003. Other studies show that, while the number of college students who drink has declined since the minimum age was raised, the percentage of college students who binge drink increased and is holding fast at about 40 percent.

The 2005 National Survey of Drug Use and Health put the number of underage drinkers at 11 million, of which nearly 7.2 million would be considered binge drinkers. "We've still got a big problem," says Ralph Hingson, director of the division of epidemiology and research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "That's the one thing everyone agrees on."

Binge drinking may be particularly dangerous for teenagers. In the years since the drinking age was 18, numerous scientific studies have found that the brain undergoes a reorganization that starts in mid-adolescence and continues into the mid-20s. Studies have also found that alcohol damages the brain, and that the damage may be greater in the developing brains of young adults.

Harvard's landmark College Alcohol Study (CAS), printed in the July 2008 issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, suggested that binge drinking was more common in college environments that had a strong drinking culture, weaker alcohol control policies, and when alcohol was easily accessible. That tends to support the idea that making alcohol more accessible and drinking more acceptable would make the problem worse.

The CAS study, which involved 50,000 students at 120 colleges from 1993 to 2001, suggested that alcohol prevention programs work best if they combine a variety of strategies that involve the entire community, including enforcement, education that involves parents, schools, and media, and activities that offer students alternatives to drinking.

Students say that college culture and peer pressure are heavy influences on drinking behavior. "As a freshman, you can get a drink if you want one," says Stiefler. "The satisfaction is in acquiring the alcohol. You feel badass."

J.T. McLain, a 22-year-old Trinity senior from Los Angeles, makes similar observations. "When I studied abroad, Americans were laughed at for blackout drinking," he says. In the U.S., he says, "binge drinking is ingrained in the culture." Lowering the drinking age, McLain thinks, would help change that culture by making drinking a public social event rather than an opportunity to get plastered in private.

"College presidents aren't out to have a more inebriated college population," McLain says. "I think it would be better to create social pressure rather than legal pressure to be responsible." McLain also points out, however, that colleges such as Trinity are "contained bubbles," with most people staying on campus and walking everywhere. And that's one reason why lowering the drinking age makes more sense to college presidents who deal with a contained population of people mostly 18 and older, than it does to high school principals, who would once again have students of drinking and driving age.

Joseph Cirasuolo, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, well remembers when the drinking age was 18. "During that time there was an increase in the problem of drinking at high school level," says Cirasuolo. Students old enough to drink felt entitled to drink at high school events, he says, even though it was against the rules. They also gave younger students greater access to alcohol.

"One of the other things we know [from studies] is the younger they are when they start to drink, the more likely they are to develop alcohol problems in later life," says Stephen Wallace, a psychologist who founded Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD). "I've seen no evidence that lowering the drinking age is going to result in less drinking. It's like the idea of getting rid of speeding by eliminating speed limits," he says. In fact, a SADD survey shows that students in sixth to 12th grade cite the drinking age as the number one reason why they chose not to drink. Even so, alcohol remains a problem even in middle school. By 12th grade, studies show that more than three in four teens are drinking.

Still, Cirasuolo says, "I don't see the logic in saying that because [alcohol] is there [among school-age children] we should make it easier." Cirasuolo thinks a better approach would be stricter enforcement of the law. In Connecticut, adults who serve alcohol to minors—whether it's a bar owner or a parent who allows drinking in the home—are breaking the law and face fines at a minimum. Drunken minors only face charges if they are in public and behaving disorderly, or if they are behind the wheel.

Who's Responsible?

Increasingly, colleges are being held accountable for students who die or are injured as a result of alcohol. A Call to Action to Prevent and Reduce Underage Drinking, a report produced by the Surgeon General, estimates that 1,700 college students die and 600,000 students are injured each year in alcohol-related incidents.

"I think the trend is growing more and more to holding colleges liable for injuries that happen related to alcohol," says Brett Sokolow, founder and president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management. "Fraternities are a big target. Most are gross negligence suits."

Some suits have carried a hefty high price tag. In 1997, Scott Krueger, a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died of alcohol poisoning at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house. MIT eventually settled for $6 million.

"It's definitely something they pay attention to and are concerned about," says Sokolow, who adds that he doesn't believe it's the driving factor in this debate.

"That wasn't the first or second thing that crossed my mind," says St. Joseph's College President Reid. "We enforce the law and put it in our student handbook. We try to have as much oversight as we can while the students are on campus, so I wasn't really worried about that [liability]."

"We are very much in favor of a discussion of binge drinking and are well aware of the problem," says Lisa Troyer, chief of staff for University of Connecticut President Phillip E. Austin, who didn't sign onto the Amethyst Initiative. "It's not really clear [lowering the drinking age] will address the issue....The president's preference is to look at alternative solutions."

Trinity's President Jones calls for "a good public debate, informed by facts and not by anecdotes." The Amethyst Initiative has certainly sparked one.

editor@newhavenadvocate.com