Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard

by Thomas Vander Ven

  A: Guys, she kind of throws herself at guys.

  Q: And that is not something that she would do sober?

  A: Gosh, no, not at all, normally around guys she is a little insecure, not really insecure but a little timid around guys, but not when she is drunk, she will grab some guy’s hand, she will make fun of people, maybe if you were sober you might say, “Oh look what he is wearing.” She’ll say, “God, what are you wearing!” and make fun and ridicule him.

  Q: Do you think the alcohol kind of allows her to be the person she would like to be?

  A: No, she is embarrassed; she has heard things about herself and remembered things that she has been pretty ashamed of.

  Q: And do people help her through that then?

  A: Yeah, we definitely have times where we have said, “Don’t worry about it, you were drunk. They understand that you are not normally like that”—that kind of conversation.

  Stephen, a twenty-three-year-old male, would rather not hear about his regrettable drunken performances, but—like many college drinkers—he has friends who will help him to justify his bad behavior:

  STEPHEN: I really don’t want to hear about it the next day, like if I was out of control or mad for some reason… or I embarrassed myself in front of a girl or something. That information can’t really help me now so why would you want to remind me of it?

  Q: Would your friends ever tell you not to be so hard on yourself? That your behavior was okay because you were intoxicated?

  A: Yes, they might give you a hard time or they would usually do the opposite though.… Someone might say… [they might] tell me not to worry about it. You know, like, “Don’t worry about it. You were funny last night. Dude, we were all that way.”

  Q: And would that make you feel better?

  A: If I was feeling bad about something I did or said, which is probably only rarely, but yeah.

  Why do people readily excuse their friends when they behave badly while intoxicated? One obvious answer is “that’s what friends are for.” It makes sense to surround ourselves with people who are likely to give us unconditional support. But there are other reasons for the delivery of positive appraisals to drunken friends. For example, college drinkers are able to take the role of the other when evaluating the intoxicated behaviors of their friends. “What comes around goes around,” and though my friend may be acting like a drunken jackass tonight, it could just as easily be me acting that way next weekend. Thus a codrinker may give his or her friend “a pass” for boorish behavior because the codrinker may need a reciprocal pass some day in the future. Katie, a twenty-year-old female, explains:

  Q: Do you and your friends try to control each other’s behaviors? Like you said, there is some fighting and backstabbing that goes on. Do you have to have a talk with someone the next morning about their behavior?

  A: Yeah, but I would usually leave it alone. We just know that people drink too much and say things they wouldn’t normally say. So it’s just, get over it you know? I don’t want to make you feel bad for something because it could just as easily be, depending on the night, me that was the problem.

  Q: So you can put yourself in their shoes and say, “That could be me.” So that would keep you from getting into a confrontation with them…?

  A: Right.

  Hangovers and Regrets: The Final Stage

  The post-intoxication experience is the final stage of the typical college drinking episode. If drinkers are able to manage and tolerate the hangovers and regrets that they face, they are likely to decide that the total experience was worth whatever troubles they encountered. Most importantly, if drinkers receive the social support necessary to pass through this stage, they will be ready to drink to excess again when the opportunity arises (often that very night). While many respondents reported experiencing a hangover after their last drinking episode, very few were dissuaded from future heavy drinking as a result. It appears that the discomforts associated with the alcohol hangover were minimized by way of definitional exercises, neutralization strategies, and treatment remedies. One of the more common techniques was to argue that the hangover was not problematic because it did not interfere with social obligations or social role requirements. Furthermore, for those who have fun when they drink to excess, a hangover may simply seem worth the trouble, and another opportunity to explore the pleasantries of getting drunk with friends might weaken the memory of a past alcohol hangover.

  Psychological uneasiness, too, must be negotiated during the post-intoxication period. College drinkers use alcohol to strategically disarm their usual self-monitoring process and, as a result, sometimes deliver disappointing and shameful performances. Managing the psychological hangovers of drunken misbehavior is often accomplished with the assistance of like-minded drinkers who readily excuse their misdeeds and, thus, enable them to continue their full participation in the drinking scene. Although drunk support, hangover assistance, and unconditional positive regard are clearly beneficial to college drinkers, these things contain a dark side. That is, the care that codrinkers give to one another may facilitate involvement in dangerous drinking and behaviors that may jeopardize the educational careers of heavy drinkers. This tension among the affection, care, and critical support that codrinkers give to one another and the cycle of heavy drinking that it encourages is the central paradox of the college drinking scene. As demonstrated in the previous chapters, heavy drinkers take part in the college drinking scene for a variety of reasons—because doing so facilitates social interaction and sexual liaisons, because it generates laughter and adventures, and because codrinkers support each other during troubling drinking episodes in ways that are beneficial to both the giver and receiver of support. Thus, trying to reduce college drinking in the current cultural climate may be a herculean task. In the next and final chapter, I will summarize my findings on the cycle of heavy drinking practices that many university students are engaged in and suggest some efforts that may be employed to reduce the harms associated with “getting wasted.”

  6 USING DRUNK SUPPORT

  Responding to the Persistence of Heavy Drinking

  We went to another bar and the roomie, her mom, and I just strolled on into the bar. The other three got carded and left for home. There I drank some Absolut and Cranberry, not sure how many. We closed the bars, went home, and I called my ex-boyfriend for some odd reason—and I hate that guy. I got two words in and then puked from 3 am to 5:30 am. I puked in my newly bought Walmart trash can. I felt like shit. I think I might have died a few times. I had to throw the trash can out the next morning. Come to think of it, I’m not sure how I got home that night. Hmmm… Anyway, I swore off alcohol… buuuttt… we’re having a party on Friday. Can’t wait

  (Stephanie, twenty-year-old female)

  Stephanie’s sobriety pledge lasted a whole week. Is this rational behavior? While she was obviously exaggerating about “dying a few times,” she was clearly traveling in Shit Show territory. But Stephanie was not deterred by this unfortunate episode. Why would she choose to dance with alcohol again after it treated her so unkindly that night? Many nondrinking college students just don’t understand this reasoning. The recklessness of heavy drinkers doesn’t make sense to them. Abstainers (those who choose not to drink alcohol at all) are a significant subpopulation on college campuses. And they appear to be as firmly committed to sobriety as heavy drinkers are to getting tanked. The next section discusses some of the demographic characteristics of abstainers and the unique worldviews of this understudied segment of the university population. Maybe we can learn something from those who choose to distance themselves from alcohol.

  The Abstainers

  According to College Alcohol Study researchers Henry Wechsler and Bernice Wuethrich, “Students often hear that everybody in college binge drinks. They may feel pressure to binge drink in order to fit in. But our research shows that a majority—56 percent—do not binge drink, including 20 percent who abstain from alcohol altogether.”1 How do so man
y college students manage to avoid the drinking scene when it appears to be so firmly embedded in college culture? Well, according to many abstainers, it’s easy. To them, it’s a rational choice. Andy, a twenty-two-year-old male, is confounded by the college drinking phenomenon:

  I have tasted alcohol twice. Once when I was young. Once at the beginning of freshman year in college. When I was young, the taste was a curiosity. I don’t even remember my reaction. The taste I had my freshman year was at a party I attended off campus. I was curious to see what parties looked like. Someone offered me a drink and told me it was fruit punch. I tasted it and didn’t like it. I later learned it was actually an alcoholic beverage. I don’t like alcohol for several reasons. It tastes bad. It costs too much. It desensitizes people. I believe this has led to many of the problems facing society today, the main one being that people don’t care. I have observed drunk people having what they call a good time and it is just a bunch of yelling and jumping around. They don’t even remember it the next morning. They do wake up feeling awful however. I don’t like inflicting negative physical conditions on myself.

  Andy is not a drinker, but he seems to know something about the intoxicated behavior of his university peers. Interestingly, he points out that drunks get desensitized by alcohol to the point where they “don’t care.” Many of my respondents, of course, agree with this assessment, but they see carelessness as one of the benefits of getting loaded. As illustrated in many drinking stories offered by my respondents, college drinkers use alcohol as a vehicle towards achieving a temporary suspension of care. Andy has also observed the mysterious transformation of human interaction that results from heavy drinking (i.e., “a bunch of yelling and jumping around”) and the blackouts and the hangovers. This seems absurd to him. He casually summarizes his position by saying that he doesn’t “like inflicting negative physical conditions” on himself. Like Andy, the following respondents can’t figure out why people would want to become intoxicated when it clearly leads to foolish behavior, carelessness, and regrets:

  I never drank in high school, so I thought that by at least tasting a bit of it, I would be able to see what it was like. And for the record I hated it.… I have only drank alcohol four times so far in my college experience. But I was never intoxicated or even close to being intoxicated. I do not see the point in getting drunk and making a fool of yourself in front of complete strangers.… (Joanne, nineteen-year-old female)

  A lot of college students drink just to get drunk and I think that is being irresponsible. Because they can do crazy and illegal things while being drunk, not knowing what they are doing, and regretting it. (Carolyn, eighteen-year-old female)

  Andy and Joanne are pretty good representatives of the typical college abstainer in that they were both abstainers during their high school years and each of them generally dislikes the idea of alcohol intoxication and all that it entails. More generally, recent scholarship on abstainers shows that those who refrain from drinking in college are more likely than alcohol users to be male, to have negative attitudes towards alcohol use, to have abstained from alcohol use prior to entering college, to be unaffiliated with Greek organizations, to be nonathletes, to be nonsmokers and non–marijuana users, to have a mother who abstains, to have a close friend who abstains, and to be an active participant in a religious group.2

  Religiosity may result in abstention because of a general perception that substance abuse is immoral and because religious people are more likely to surround themselves with nondrinking peers. Many religious college students reside in a different social universe than the typical college alcohol abuser does. Furthermore, many religious groups see alcohol as a liquid path to further temptation. If alcohol lowers inhibitions, as so many of my respondents acknowledge, drinking may lead to impure thoughts and immoral behaviors. A recent sociological study of the relationship between religion and college drinking discusses the broadly held anti-alcohol sentiments harbored by most religious groups:

  We are aware of no mainstream religious group that encourages heavy drinking or alcohol abuse. Proscriptive groups include most fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant churches, as well as neo-Protestant, sectarian groups (e.g., Mormons or Latter-Day Saints). Most religious conservatives tend to view human nature as inherently sinful and vulnerable to temptation. Although much of the evangelical discourse surrounding alcohol has inveighed against drunkenness, based on numerous biblical passages on this subject, alcohol consumption at almost any level may tend to reduce inhibitions and undercut the influence of normative constraints on individual behavior. Thus, any influence of alcohol may serve as a precursor to other sinful behavior. Therefore, from this perspective, abstention from alcohol is often seen as the safest route to insure godly, sober, Christian lifestyles.3

  According to one representative survey administered by an interdisciplinary research team, participation time in religious group activities was directly related to abstention from alcohol in college. Those who did not participate in church-related functions were the least likely to abstain from drinking and, among religious group participants, the greater the time spent in activities, the higher the abstention rate.4 According to this informant, his religious beliefs and involvement in a youth ministry have helped him to resist temptations: “I have not consumed alcohol since I started college. I do not drink because of my religious beliefs and because of my involvement with a youth [church] organization. I have had pressure to drink from my friends and roommates and I have also had the urge to drink. Fortunately, I have resisted” (nineteen-year-old male).

  As detailed earlier, most heavy drinkers equate collective intoxication with fun. Being wasted provides a context for laughter, intimacy, dancing, and adventure. But most abstainers do not see it that way. In fact, for some religious college students, the contradiction between drinking and “joy” is fairly black and white. The following nineteen-year-old male reports that the Bible told him not to drink and he has complied:

  I have never drank or consumed alcoholic beverages. I have always felt that it was my responsibility to stay sober so that I could be a successful student and person. I am a Christian, and I feel as though I can show the light of Christ better sober than drunk. In fact, in the Bible, it says that God will bring more joy to you than alcohol can and some of the believers in Acts were actually considered drunken just by their actions when God led them. Therefore, I don’t need alcohol to have joy and it has never affected me for right or wrong.

  Religious organizations have not cornered the market on anti-alcohol rhetoric. Certain high-profile secular groups have also actively recruited young people into the sober lifestyle. Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD), for example, has been championing abstention since 1981. Originally conceived as Students Against Drunk Driving, SADD has morphed into an activist group that encourages young people to lead education and prevention efforts in their schools and in their communities. SADD rails against all kinds of “destructive decisions,” including underage drinking, drug abuse, and drunk driving. According to the SADD website, alcohol use is a bad idea because

  it alters an individual’s vision, reaction times, perception of distance, and judgment of one’s abilities. For adolescents, whose brains are still developing in critical ways, alcohol use makes them more vulnerable to learning and memory impairments. The use of alcohol is frequently coupled with risky and potentially destructive behaviors such as physical and emotional violence, rude or thoughtless remarks or actions, sexual mistakes or misjudgments, sexual assaults, and suicide acts and attempts.5

  While SADD is generally aimed at high school students, there are other antidrinking and recovery groups that are more active on college campuses. Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, has active chapters on many of our nation’s campuses, including at UCLA, Texas A & M University, and Rider University in New Jersey. Furthermore, many colleges have created recovery houses for students struggling with addiction. Rutgers University led the way for the campus recovery
house movement when they opened the first recovery dorm for their students in 1988.6

  There are other, more radical groups that seek to fight addiction and drug and alcohol consumption among young people. The straight edge movement, for example, has had some impact in colleges and universities across the United States. According to sociologist and straight edge researcher Ross Haenfler, straight edge culture grew out of and as a response to the punk rock scene of the late 1970s.7 The straight edge way is regarded as a “clean living” alternative to the excesses and consumer-based determinism of modern life. The most radical straight edge devotees eschew drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and sex outside of a loving relationship. According to Haenfler, the movement has spread from the eastern United States into a worldwide phenomenon fueled by music, apparel, tattoos, and internet activity. Straight edge youth often adorn their clothes or bodies with an X signifying their life-long commitment to avoiding drugs and alcohol and to maintaining a clear mind in order to maximize self-actualization and to resist the pressures of peer culture. For a very small minority of straight edge kids, resistance takes the form of violence against their less pure brothers and sisters. In the late 1990s—to use one extreme example—radical straight edge youth in Salt Lake City, Utah, reportedly assaulted a group of fraternity guys for the crime of polluting their bodies with substances: