With Potsdam being the college town it is, it’s not hard to find groups of people on the weekends drinking who are under the age of 21. Along with SUNY Potsdam, there is Clarkson University right next door, and ten minutes down the road you can find SUNY Canton and St. Lawrence University, so there is no argument that you can call Potsdam a “college town.” With 15,000 plus college kids living within 20 minutes of each other, there are going to be parties with kids drinking underage. Drinking under the age of 21 is first off illegal, but also can affect a lot of things in their life, and the community in which they live.
When a student enters college for the first time, the initial thing they realize is how much freedom they have. There is no one telling you what to do, or things you cannot do. In college there are a lot of experiments with different things. Students are introduced to a lot of things that they might have not had in their home town. The first and foremost thing that most college kids are introduced to is a large number of parties. During my first weekend at Potsdam there had to be at least 10-15 parties a night all along Pierrepont Avenue. At these parties, there is a large amount of alcohol consumption, with some kids drinking who have never had alcohol before in their lives and some kids who have been introduced to drinking at a young age.
I estimate that over a quarter of the student body under 21 at SUNY Potsdam engages in drinking. I wanted to see if this affected the Campus or the community of Potsdam in any way. The first thing I did was I interviewed Martha Lamica from Health Services. I said, “How often does a student come in on drunk related incidents?” She replied, “there really have not been any incidents where a student has come in due to drunken incidents, but there has been problems with students drinking too much and that is where we make them go to an alcohol rehab clinic to try and get help.” With this information, it is safe to say that with the number of drinkers on campus there don’t seem to be any issues with students and health issues, and, if there are, they are not going to health services for them.
The next person I interviewed about this issue was Lieutenant Ten Eyck at University Police. I asked him a series of questions starting with “How often do you pull over a drunk driver?” He replied, “If we suspect a drunk driving incident and find they are drinking and driving we always pull them over and arrest them. The police here have a zero tolerance around campus and if we see it they’re going to get caught.” He also said, “In past years there have been forty to fifty reports of drunk driving in a month and about 5-10 of them are students.” I then asked him, “How often do you arrest a person for being drunk walking or riding a bike on the sidewalk?” He said, “Actually there is no crime in walking or riding a bike under the influence of alcohol, but if that person was under the influence of a drug then we can and will arrest them.” Lastly I asked him, “What actions are the police taking towards this problem.” He replied it’s really not the police taking action but more on the person. He says more people are being designated drivers and using the taxi system to prevent DWIs. That made a lot of sense to me because at our high school we have this program called Safe Rides, which provides rides at any times to kids who are unable to drive and reduces the risk of drinking and driving.
Even though there has been a steady decrease in the number of DWIs issued in the Potsdam community, according to the Lieutenant, there still remains a big problem in the way students consume alcohol. The issue of binge drinking is spread widely across all colleges in the United States. The nature of binge drinking is to consume heavy amounts of alcohol in a short amount of time. Generally most kids will drink before they go out drinking, usually called “pre-gaming” which can result in serious harm to the body. In the case of Adam Falcon, a student at St. Lawrence University, the result was death. According to the information news page on the St. Lawrence web site, Falcon’s body was located, deceased and submerged in the Grasse River in the Village of Canton. The reports of the toxicology test on Falcon’s body showed that his blood alcohol was significantly higher than the legal limit. Falcon was reported at the Tick Tock Inn Tavern in Canton, where he was sold alcohol with a borrowed I.D. even though he was under the age of 21. It is reported from the police statement on the St. Lawrence news page that even before Adam went to this bar he was drinking at a campus residence hall. This is one of many cases where binge drinking has turned to death, and even with people dying there still continues to be a high level of binge drinking going on in the United States today. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention about 90 percent of the alcohol consumed by youth under the age of 21 years in the United States is in the form of binge drinks.
Lastly I interview George Arnold, who is the director of PACES dining services. He lives on Bay Street so I thought it would be good to get a perspective on a person who actually lives right near the college. I asked him, “How many nights does it get noisy and makes it annoying to live where you live?” He answered “Every night. I live right across from two ex fraternities, and I could see if it was at 11 at night or something but when its 2, 3, or even 4 in the morning and students are blabbing on their cell phones and screaming at each other it can definitely get annoying.” There are tons of people who live close to the school who are not students and have to deal with these kinds of problems every weekend. Next time a student decides to go out and drink, they should make sure they are being respectful to the people who live on the same streets as the parties and try to be as quiet as possible.
The article, “The Role of Monthly Spending Money in College Student Drinking Behaviors and Their Consequences,” states that students who report having more monthly spending money are more likely to drink and experience alcohol-related consequences. In the survey conducted by the authors they interviewed a collection of students and found out that students with $100-$200 a month in spending money were the most likely to drink compared to students with less than $100 a month in spending money. Their reasoning in doing this survey was to see if college students were mostly the same in their drinking habits and if a student’s money level directly affected their consumption of alcohol. They stated issues that should be changed in alcohol consumption in all colleges in the United States: for example, not offering specials on drinks such as the 2-for-1 drink, penny drafts, and similar promotions at bars and restaurants in the town. The research gathered by these professionals presents a very interesting look on how your money habits during your years at college affect how you drink. People with less money in the pockets will most likely stay in and not go out and spend money on alcohol. People with money to spend will go out and buy things and most likely it will be alcohol.
Now that we see how money can affect your drinking habits in college, we can look at drinking in college as a whole and how it can be a time in a person’s life where they drink the most. I read an article called “Religiousness, Spirituality, and Social Support: How are they related to underage drinking among college students?” In the article it states, “Most college students are under the legal drinking age of 21. Yet research shows that the ages of 18-21 represent the time of heaviest alcohol consumption for most drinkers and that heavy drinking is more prevalent among college students than among nonstudents of the same age.” (Brown, Tamara L. Johnston, O’Malley Bachman, & Schulenberg, 12). “About 2 in 5 college students engage in heavy episodic drinking, a style of drinking that has been associated with negative consequences such as academic difficulties, antisocial behavior, health and psychosocial problems, high-risk sexual behavior, and other risk behaviors such as drinking and driving.” (Brown, Tamara L. Johnston, O’Malley Bachman, & Schulenberg, 7)
Each year, “approximately 5,000 young people under the age of 21 die as a result of underage drinking, which includes about 1,900 deaths from motor vehicle crashes, 1,600 as a result of homicides, 300 from suicide, as well as hundreds from other injuries,” according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But still kids continue to drink underage and are starting to drink at a younger age. Researchers from (HHS) concluded that in 2003, “the average age of the first use of alcohol was about 14, compared to about 17 in 1965. People who reported starting to drink before the age of 15 were four times more likely to report meeting the criteria for alcohol dependence at some point in their lives.” Young adults who range from 17-20 in the Potsdam community and drink are putting themselves in serious harm. Research shows that the “brain keeps developing well into the twenties, and they believe that this lengthy developmental period may help explain why some teens act so impulsively and often not recognizing that their actions-such as drinking- have consequences.” When the brain is developing during these times, alcohol can seriously affect the development process of the brain and lead to severe medical problems later in life. Also according to the article “Alcohol Misuse and Adolescent Sexual Behaviors and Risk Taking” from the book of The American Academy of Pediatrics its studies show that teenagers who misused alcohol were at substantially increased risk of early onset sexual behaviors, multiple partners, and unprotected intercourse. This can lead to spreading of sexually transmitted diseases and other health related problems.
It is clear that alcohol can have a serious effect on an adolescent’s life, but what about the community in which the underage drinking is being done? With Potsdam being the town it is with all the college students, it would not be hard to find them drinking at parties on the weekends. When I have walked the streets of Potsdam on late Saturday nights, you can see college kids screaming, yelling, being very loud, and stumbling back to their dorms. There can be serious concerns for the police when they have drunk college kids walking in the middle of the road, and have no idea that a car is coming. It can require the drivers to be even more cautious at night because you never know when a drunk kid is going to run out in the middle of the road. With all the college kids drinking, there must be a few that drink and drive. Drunk driving accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the United Sates and according to the Mothers against Drunk Driving statistics sheet about 11, 773 of the 37,261 total traffic fatalities in 2008 were drunk driving crashes involving a driver with an illegal blood alcohol content. Along with watching out for kids in the road, drivers must be even more aware of drunk drivers on the road. In the North Country Now Newspaper the police statement said there was a recent incident of a man in Potsdam who was three times the .08 percent threshold for DWI and hit a fire hydrant, two trees and finally hit someone front porch.
With this research gathered, the people reading this who are underage and drink should think twice about what they are doing. A good majority of students here at SUNY Potsdam drink underage, if they were ever caught at parties or in there room drinking, they would face serious punishment or even being kicked out of school. How the community and the surrounding towns deal with this problem is still a mystery, there still continues to be a high majority of college kids drinking under the age of 21 in the town of Potsdam. With the stress of the workload in college it is easy to see why these kids drink in the first place. It relaxes your body and makes you feel good, it gives you a chance to be yourself and at parties it makes you more comfortable in social situations. There is no doubt that underage drinking cannot be stopped completely, but maybe there can be ways to prevent it, or raise the punishment for underage drinking so the students know what they are risking when they are drinking.
Works Cited
"Adam Falcon Death '06." (St. Lawrence University Information Page). University Communications, 9 Dec. 2004. Web. 11 Nov. 2009.
Brown, Tamara L Johnston, O’ Malley Bachman, & Schulenberg "Religiousness, Spirituality, and Social Support: How are they related to underage drinking among college students?" Ebscohost, 2 June 2008. Web. 11 Nov. 2009.
Fergusson, David M. (Alcohol Misuse, Adolescent Sexual Behaviors, and Risk Taking). July- Sept ed. Vol. 98. Grove Village: American Academy of Pediatrics, 1996. Print. Ser. 1996.
Hanson, David J. "Alcohol Problems and Solutions." Underage Drinking. Sociology Department, State University of New York, Potsdam. Web. 11 Nov. 2009.
"Potsdam man charged with DWI after vehicle strikes fire hydrant, crashes into porch." (North Country NOW). Potsdam police blotter, 27 Nov. 2009. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.
"Statistics of drunk driving crashes in 2008." MADD- Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 3 Jan. 2009. Web.
"Quick Stats Binge Drinking." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Alcohol and Public Health, 6 Aug. 2008. Web. 11 Nov. 2009.
"The Role of Monthly Spending Money in College Student Drinking Behaviors and Their Consequences." Ebscohost, 3 Aug. 2007. Web. 11 Nov. 2009.
Lamica, Martha Personal Interview 11/14/09
Lieuteant Ten Eyck, Richard Personal Interview 11/14/09
Arnold, George Personal Interview 12/3/09
No comments:
Post a Comment