College Drinking: Less Than You Think

By Daniela Deane
Sunday, September 23, 2007; B01

Last month, we took our younger son back to college. Ben's a sophomore at the College of Charleston now, almost 20, and he just moved into an off-campus house with five buddies. (I know. Scary.)

First thing he needed was furniture. So my husband and I loaded up a U-Haul, drove to South Carolina and made Ben's room rather nice, we thought. We put an old chair of ours in the corner by the window. Good place for all that reading you have to do in college.

That night, we went our separate ways, Ben meeting up with friends from freshman year. We made an appointment for lunch the next day. When we arrived, Ben seemed out of sorts, had a headache. The cushion on the chair was backward. I turned it around. There was a big greenish-brown stain on the bottom.

"What happened to this cushion?" I asked. Ben looked down sheepishly. "I puked on it," he said quietly.

What? I was stunned into silence, which isn't an easy thing to do to me.

First because he'd been drinking until he vomited. We knew he drank, but hadn't he learned yet that drinking that much wasn't any fun? And then the stupidity of vomiting on a chair we had just brought from Washington for his new room. While we were still in Charleston. Omigod. The kid had no brain, and we were leaving him in this big, drafty old house nine hours from where we live.

Thing is (and I don't think I'm just a mom deluding myself here), Ben's a pretty normal college kid. He's a nice guy with a heart of gold, I swear. He's close to his family; he's doing fine in school. I don't want to jinx anything, but we're pretty sure he'll turn out okay in the end.

But he drinks. Regularly. Plenty, apparently. Sometimes until he throws up, I guess, although he swore that that was a rarity and that he usually aims for the toilet. When I told the chair story to my older son, who's at James Madison University in Virginia, he informed me that some girls actually like to drink until they vomit, to get rid of all those unwanted calories. There are lots of fun games at college that involve imbibing huge amounts of booze really really quickly. A $150,000 B.A. in beer pong, anyone?

Lots of college kids -- mostly underage -- drink. We all know that. But it's against the law. And that means something.

I've been thinking a lot about the law these days, ever since I started covering a crime and courts beat here at The Washington Post in March. I've seen some heart-wrenching, thought-provoking cases involving underage drinking since I started -- cases that have made me look hard at my own parenting, how my two sons view drinking and how the law views all of us.

I've been doing a lot of soul-searching -- and the cushion incident only made matters worse. Have my husband and I been too permissive, hostages to our own upbringing? Did we give these boys too much credit for knowing when enough is enough?

Soul-searching turned into researching, though, and what I found actually quieted my anxious heart. Despite the headlines, the truth is that drinking among college students has decreased. And young people's attitudes about drinking and driving have changed, too, with many of them much more reluctant to get behind the wheel after imbibing.

Of course, there's still tremendous heartache.

As soon as we got back from Charleston, I covered the case of a 19-year-old Alexandria boy -- sorry, I can't help calling him a boy because he's the same age as Ben -- who was charged with drunken-driving manslaughter in the death of his best friend in a horrible accident. The friend was in a coma for four months before he died in April. The kid on trial visited him in the hospital almost daily, according to court testimony. As I looked at the young boy-man on the stand in his ill-fitting suit, I thought the lump in my throat might never go down. Could one of my boys have been sitting there instead?

Then there was the Charlottesville mother of two boys who got 27 months in prison for having an underage-drinking party for her son's 16th birthday a few years ago. I spent the day with her and her son down in Charlottesville the weekend before she reported to prison. The son told me that he'd asked his sports-coaching stay-at-home mom to host the party -- and buy the beer and wine coolers. She agreed, under the condition that everyone spend the night. She collected keys. Nobody left or got hurt.

Her explanation for that "really stupid mistake" was that she knew they'd drink anyway, so she was trying to keep them off the roads and safe at home.

Uh-oh, know that feeling. Could that have been us?

Then, for a follow-up article, I talked to a Fairfax woman who lost her only child, a 17-year-old son, in a crash after an underage-drinking party she thinks was hosted by parents. She was a single mom. He was all she had.

I can't speak for other parents, but for my husband and me, the worry that kept us up at night during our sons' high school years was drinking, yes, but mostly drinking and driving. Drinking and staggering we thought we had little choice but to accept. After all, we're not the perfect role models. I'm Italian-born -- drinking a glass of wine with dinner is part of eating. My husband is British -- having a few drinks is part of life. We don't have drinking problems, though.

A couple of uncomfortable truths: When my husband was a lad in London, he used to order his pints at the pub in his school uniform. When I was a high-school kid in Northern Virginia and the drinking age in the District was 18, we used to hop across the Key Bridge to Georgetown to buy our beer.

But the line in the sand for us was drinking and driving. We just wouldn't abide it. "Call us anytime," we said. "We'll pick you and your buddies up, no questions asked. Just never drink and drive. And don't get in the car with anyone who has. Please." I don't think we were alone in reciting that mantra.

And guess what? There are signs that all that talking might be working.

Believe me, I don't minimize for one moment the unimaginable pain of a parent who has lost a child in an accident caused by a young drinker. I can't even comprehend a grief so deep. But the truth is, these kinds of life-destroying tragedies are happening less than they used to. I can't help finding hope in that.

Drinking and driving among teenagers "decreased spectacularly" in the two decades leading up to the late 1990s, according to a report on the Web site of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The number of accidents involving legally impaired drivers younger than 21 (any blood-alcohol level is illegal for the underage) dropped by 61 percent between 1982 and 1998, going from 4,393 to 1,714. Although overall drinking and driving in the United States decreased substantially in that period, the report maintains that the decline was led by drivers under the age of 21. Most of that drop took place between 1982 and 1992.

Since 1995, the decline has slowed, and the number of young drivers involved in fatal crashes has stayed relatively static, although NHTSA reports that the percentage of alcohol-related fatalities for all age groups dropped from 60 percent in 1982 to 39 percent in 2005.

The report on young drivers, "Determine Why There Are Fewer Young Alcohol-Impaired Drivers," credits the minimum drinking age of 21 and zero-tolerance laws, but says that those changes "clearly did not cause the entire decrease," pointing out that Canada saw a similar decline over the same period, even though its drinking age didn't change and zero-tolerance alcohol laws weren't enacted until after the drop was recorded.

And that's what was really striking to me.

What changed over the reporting period, says the NHTSA, for both quantifiable and unquantifiable reasons, were young people's attitudes toward drinking and driving, although "most youths still drink." (I think we've established that.)

But there are some surprises there, too. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) reports that drinking by college students is down, with 86.2 percent saying they had consumed alcohol in 2003, compared with 93.6 percent in 1991.

But what about all that binge drinking we read about? All those college kids getting blotto at big parties every weekend, the ambulances on call outside the dorms to help students who drink themselves silly?

MADD cites a 2002 Harvard study saying that 44 percent of college students admit that they binge drink -- that is, if they're men, they've had five or more drinks in a row in a two-week period, or four or more drinks in a row if they're women. That's a Friday night party at either JMU or the College of Charleston, as far as I can tell.

But the study's numbers also mean that more than half don't binge drink.

Everyone agrees that we need to keep working to bring those drinking and accident numbers down further. But in the meantime, my husband and I take some solace from the NHTSA report, which concludes that North American "youth have separated their drinking from their driving."

Over the din of weekend kegger parties, my sons bear this out.

They tell me that yeah, lots of people play beer pong on the weekends -- with the occasional vomit showing up on someone's floor or in their closet -- but they're not drinking and driving. They're staggering home; they're busing it; they're spending the night; they have designated drivers.

Thank Mothers Against Drunk Driving, thank school programs, thank the laws, but thank all us plain old worried parents, too.

"We got it that it can ruin your life and kill somebody," said my elder boy-man last week. "We're just not that stupid, Mom."

Really? You're not? Okay, that makes me feel a little better. Now, will you promise you'll grow out of all this after college?