Extreme Drinking Means Extreme Danger for College Students
According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, some 2,000 college co-eds die every year due to an alcohol-related injury and 600,000 more are hurt in some other way. Emergency rooms near campuses are treating more and more young adults with lethal blood alcohol levels ranging from .30 to .40.
Almost half of college students report that they have engaged in “binge drinking” which is defined as four or five drinks in a period of two hours or less. Experts argue that we have a new kind of drinking among college students and it should warrant a new label called “extreme drinking.”
The term “extreme drinking” is an intentional race to see who can become intoxicated the fastest. The recipe is malt beverages, many shots and hard liquors blended with those super-caffeinated energy drinks you see in the checkout lane or so-called fruit-punch combinations like “jungle juice”. Young adults refer to this type of drinking as a “controlled loss of control” and that in itself tells you something dangerous about their thinking.
It still isn’t clear exactly how much of the juice makes up a “drink” by the normal guidelines. The Chicago Tribune recently reported on the appeal of a drink referred to as “blackout in a can”. A teenager from New Jersey reported that it “tastes like candy” and comes in a 23.5 ounce serving that is equal to that of more than four normal-sized beers.
College administrators are worried and 14 schools have already formed a group regarding this situation called High Risk Drinking. There are also 60 other schools participating in a program called Red Watch Band program that teaches collegiates about drinking and how toxic it can be and promotes them to help others when they recognize their excessive drinking problem.
