Addiction or Paranoid Hype?

By John Finn '69 | Wednesday, January 14, 1998

The recent incident in which an MIT student drank himself to death has renewed talk about college students' drinking and how best to prevent this kind of terrible consequence.

This country seems at last to have acknowledged that alcohol is every bit as much a drug as heroin or cocaine, and one with potentially disastrous effects. But I continue to be disturbed by how much of the received wisdom of what 'everyone knows,' about laws pertaining to drinking, and problem drinking is contrary to fact.

Here I want to summarize what these laws, particularly in New Hampshire and Vermont, really are, and to consider what controlled studies have revealed about problem drinking, particularly among college students.

What I really hope to do is to encourage Dartmouth students, especially those who drink, to find out for themselves what the laws are, and what research reveals about problem drinking.

Baker Library has the complete New Hampshire and Vermont statutes (right above the serials reading room) and a wide selection of books on problem drinking, including several that challenge popular notions. I believe that the more students make themselves aware of the facts, the less likely incidents like that at MIT become.

Much of the ignorance about drinking laws stems from the widespread notion, steadfastly maintained by the media, that a having certain blood alcohol content (BAC), .08 in most states, legally constitutes being intoxicated, or drunk. This is entirely false. In New Hampshire, the facts are these:

(1) There is no 'drunk driving' or 'driving while intoxicated' (DWI) law. The law (NH statute 265:82) is DUI, Driving under the Influence of Drugs or Liquor. This statute, which takes a BAC of .08 as constituting driving under the influence, does not even mention intoxication.

(2) A BAC of .08 or higher otherwise has no legal significance whatever, and certainly does not constitute the legal definition of intoxication. This definition (NH 172-B:1; X)) is entirely in terms of behavior, and does not mention BAC.

(3) Being intoxicated is not a violation of any law. In fact, New Hampshire statute 172-B:4, Laws Relating to Intoxication, says

I. No political subdivision of the state may adopt or enforce an ordinance or bylaw having the force of law that includes being found in an intoxicated condition as one of the elements of the offense giving rise to a criminal or civil penalty. No political subdivision may interpret or apply any law of general application to circumvent this provision.

This law holds regardless of age.

(4) The only law regarding alcohol and those under 21 is NH 179:10, Underage Possession of Alcoholic Beverages. This law does not include underage consumption of alcohol, and prohibits only the possession of beverages; there is no such thing as 'internal possession' of beverages

If a 17- or 18-year-old is staggering drunk down Main Street, he is not in violation of any NH law whatsoever. His intoxication suggests, of course, that he was earlier in possession of alcoholic beverages, but not enough to warrant an arrest for violating 179:10.

(5) There is a Protective Custody statute (172-B:3), which gives the police the right to take into custody a person so intoxicated as to seem likely to harm himself or others. This statute pertains only to an intoxicated person, and not to one only under the influence of alcohol, regardless of age. And while this statute does permit the police to hold such a person, who has had a few drinks but is not drunk, in jail, rather than taking him home or to friends, it is they who are violating the law.

In the fall of '94, a number of students complained that Hanover police officers were lurking outside parties, then detaining and interrogating those leaving the party. Those under 21 were being intimidated into submitting to breath tests, and if they registered a BAC of .02 (a single drink for an average-size man), were being arrested and charged with NH 179:10.

A number of students made complaints to the New Hampshire ACLU, which voted unanimously to take action against the Hanover Police. NHCLU Attorney Steve Borofsky handled the case, and arrived at a friendly settlement with the Hanover Police, who acknowledged that they had made improper arrests, and agreed to stop doing so.

The arrests of underage students leaving a party after having as little as a single drink bring us to the question of what constitutes problem drinking. Now, I consider walking home from a party after having only one or two drinks to be exemplary of responsible, mature, drinking. Of course, if a person doing so is under 21, he or she has violated the law, as have those who provided the drinks.

Is drinking in violation of the law indicative of a drinking problem? This certainly seemed to be the presumption of the Hanover Police, who gave the option to the students they arrested of avoiding a misdemeanor conviction by completing an 'alcohol diversion' program.

What does constitute 'problem drinking' among college students? In the last five or ten years we increasingly read alarming statistics about 'binge drinking' on campus. When I first saw such an article I was shocked, never having been aware of any of my own students going on drinking binges. But this was before I read the fine print.

Like many of those over 40, I took a 'drinking binge' to mean at least several days of morning-to-night drinking. The novel The Lost Weekend, for instance, which was made into a movie starring Ray Milland, and which first publicized the views of Alcoholics Anonymous, is about a 6-day binge, the protagonist consuming a couple of quarts of Scotch each day. And this he regards as a minor binge, unlike the 3-week long binges he's gone on earlier.

When I did read the fine print, I saw that 'binge drinking' was 'defined' to mean having five or more drinks in a single evening; four or more for a woman. This definition has since been altered to four or more drinks for a man, and that this change in definition reflects the change in DUI laws from a .10 to a .08 BAC cannot be coincidence. 'Binge drinking,' then, is defined to mean consuming just enough in a single evening to render a person in violation of the DUI law, commonly misinterpreted as being 'legally intoxicated.' The phrase seems to be a retronym, or back-formation, from the 'binge eating' characteristic of some eating disorders.

But surely those who introduced 'binge drinking' had to be aware that 'drinking binge,' with which it is certainly likely to be confused, already had a well-established meaning, and one much more severe than the sort of drinking they mean. In Facts and Values: Studies in Ethical Analysis (Yale University Press, 1963), Charles L. Stevenson tells us that 'a 'persuasive' definition is one which gives a new conceptual meaning to a familiar word without substantially changing its emotive meaning, and which is used with the conscious or unconscious purpose of changing, by this means, the direction of people's interests.'

That is, a persuasive definition like 'binge drinking' is a manipulative use of language, and of a sort I regard as all too common among those most outspoken about reforming student drinking. Not only is having 4 or 5 drinks in an evening not remotely related to the excesses of a real drinking binge, but I don't consider it even to indicate the kind of compulsion meant by an eating binge. If someone chugs down the 4 or 5 beers in a few minutes, sure, that's excessive and dangerous, but I simply don't see having that many drinks over the course of an entire evening as any great excess.

Perhaps it's only evidence of what these reformers would claim is my own rampant alcoholism, but when I was in college I would certainly think having 6 or 8 beers in the course of a party, for God's sake, was no big deal. And I was one of those creative loner types who abhorred drunken frat parties. But my friends and I might consume that many beers just sitting around discussing existentialism, or Kerouac, or Bob Dylan's latest album.

I imagine that a number of today's college students might well feel exactly the same, and conclude that all the fuss about 'binge drinking' is just the cackling of a bunch of old school marms, intent on throwing a sour blanket on anyone's having a good time.

If this is the case, if the rhetoric of those who hope to reform campus drinking habits only evokes scorn on the part of the students, then perhaps these reformers should themselves try a little more sobriety in their approach, lest their efforts prove counterproductive, and only encourage students to ignore any warnings about excessive drinking, and wind up drinking themselves into the emergency room or worse.

Even if we do accept frequently having four or five drinks in an evening as
excessive drinking, and note that an alarmingly high proportion of college students do then drink excessively, do we need to fear that they will persist in this excessive drinking as they get older? The evidence seems to indicate otherwise; in The Truth About Addiction and Recovery (Simon & Schuster, 1991), Stanton Peele tells us that:

'The Berkeley Alcohol Research Group has tracked Americans' drinking problems for two decades...[and] found that, even for the large majority of problem drinkers who remain untreated, drinking problems drop precipitously by the age of thirty.'

Most people, it turns out, simply curtail or eliminate their problem drinking with age. This phenomenon is a well-known one, after all, commemorated in the phrase 'sowing one's wild oats.' In the addiction field, the process of outgrowing substance abuse is called 'maturing out.'

Did you know people in a college fraternity or sorority who drank too much, or did you drink more than was good for you back then? As you may be aware, excessive college drinkers usually grow up to become moderate adult drinkers. The most thoroughgoing study of college drinkers first assessed the drinking of seventeen thousand college students in twenty-seven American colleges and universities from 1949 to 1952. While in college, 42 percent of the men were classified as problem drinkers. When assessed for a second time in 1971-72, 17 percent of the men from a sample of the original group still had a drinking problem. Some problems, like binge drinking, were common in college but disappeared almost entirely after college age. In this study, problem drinking in men shows up as a normal hazard of the college years, one that infrequently persists into middle age.

Findings like these should be reassuring to those who are concerned about a teenager who may be drinking too much with friends. In their annual national survey conducted in 1988, University of Michigan researchers found 56 percent of male college students and 35 percent of female college students had consumed five or more drinks at one sitting within the previous two weeks. This youthful binge drinking can be a serious problem; for example, we don't want to see young people hurting themselves and others by driving drunk. On the other hand, since no one would claim that 56 percent of the adult male population and 35 percent of the adult female population are alcoholics, we know that most of these young people will outgrow their excessive drinking.

Does this mean that excessive drinking in college is not a problem at all? Of course not. But I think it does mean, as I have suggested earlier, that those who want to discourage the practice would not be justified in calling for any means whatever to curb college drinking. They should not, for instance, approve of the kind of illegal police activity that occurred in Hanover, or encourage the college itself apply draconian penalties against underage drinkers. Nor should they resort to hysteria in their messages to students. Besides being unjust, I think that such extreme measures will provoke a reactionary response from the students, and may thus only make matters worse.

Addiction or Paranoid Hype?

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