Every semester, at least one of my George Mason University students turns 21. Most of the time, they write about the event after the fact in a journal entry. But last year a female student was so apprehensive about her imminent birthday that she asked, in writing, for my advice.
Her worry was that her friends had the whole evening planned, and she didn’t want to ruin their pleasure. But she was afraid. They planned a “crawl” from bar to bar, and she knew she would have to drink the shots they bought for her, but she also knew she would get sick if she did. Her question was how to participate in their plans without getting sick from too much alcohol.
This was the first time I had thought about the dilemma many students face when they turn 21. The peer pressure for a “crawl,” or for a ritual 21 shots of liquor, is formidable. On the other hand, both men and women will suffer alcohol poisoning and possible hospitalization or death if they consume 21 drinks. This is part of a bigger picture of binge drinking that has plagued campuses in recent years.
Virginia Tech has suffered adverse publicity for a few highly publicized deaths from alcohol poisoning, and as a result has taken the lead by adopting strict guidelines for alcohol infractions. Many colleges have “three strikes” policies in place, resulting in expulsions if students break the rules three times. Most notify parents of major infractions. But in 2010, Tech started notifying parents of minor alcohol infractions — including getting caught with a beer in a dorm room. Tech hopes this will alert parents before their child’s drinking escalates to a dangerous level.
On its Web site, Tech enumerates a number of revealing facts on drinking rituals, based on a survey taken in 2006 of 500 of their students one week after their 21st birthdays. sixty-five percent of the women and 72 percent of the men polled didn’t think that getting drunk on their 21st birthday was a “rite of passage,” and 95 percent of the women and 80 percent of the men didn’t attempt to consume 21 drinks on their birthdays.
Those statistics sound promising. But many of those same students admitted that they still drank too much on their birthdays: Twenty-six percent of the women and 32 percent of the men vomited that night, and a third of both sexes blacked out at least once during the birthday celebrations. That was exactly what my student was afraid of.
My advice to her was just common sense: Enlist an ally — whether bartender or friend — to help you consume water or seltzer with lime for some of the drinks. No one will be able to tell the difference between that and vodka, or a gin and tonic. Honesty also can work: Tell friends that you throw up when you’ve had too much to drink. Often that will keep them from pressuring you too hard to keep up the shots.
When I later asked my student how her birthday was, she said it went fine. Her friends understood, and she took it slow, and didn’t get sick or black out. Score one for common sense: Happy birthday to her.
