Fewer Students Brought to the Hospital for Drinking
The fall semester in charts
This past fall saw 70 BU students transported to the hospital for dangerous drinking, down roughly one-third from the previous fall’s 96 transports. The reason for the drop is unclear, says Katherine Mooney (SPH’12), BU Student Health Services Wellness & Prevention director, but “my hope is that our combined efforts of enforcement, prevention, and the publicity of our policies have contributed to this decrease.”
Among the strategies Wellness & Prevention launched this fall was a new Orientation video that debunks the notion that all students drink. Mooney says that “63 percent of Terriers stop at three drinks when they party.” Another theory about fewer transports holds that BU’s increasing number of international students tend not to require hospital trips for drinking, says Robert Molloy, deputy chief of the Boston University Police Department.
“We see the same pattern that we typically do,” Mooney says, with transports spiking during the semester’s first month as students, especially freshmen, acclimate to college life. Transports tend to spike again with Halloween drinking, although this fall the holiday did not fall on a weekend, which may have held trick-or-treat boozing and transports down, Molloy says.
Another typical datum: “First-year students are much more likely to be transported” than upperclassmen, Mooney says. The percentages of transports from older classes can be consistent over time, suggesting a cohort effect, she says: an incoming class with preexisting drinking behaviors might continue some of that behavior through their college years.
As in past years, about two-thirds of this fall’s transports were women, largely because women are a greater percentage of BU’s student body. The genders also metabolize alcohol differently; women generally have less water in their bodies, meaning the same amount of alcohol becomes more concentrated in a woman’s body than in a man’s.
The University tracks the blood alcohol content (BAC) of as many transported students as it can. The average BAC this fall, 0.187, was similar to past years’ and is a level where students are variously “blacked out, vomiting, very disoriented,” says Mooney. Massachusetts law deems a BAC of .08 in most cases as too impaired to drive.
Since 2011, the University has boosted alcohol abuse enforcement each fall—breaking up loud parties, issuing citations for illegal drinking and related infractions, and publishing transport and enforcement statistics on BU Today. The University will begin its beefed up spring semester enforcement the weekend of March 15 to 18, when BUPD and Boston Police Department officers will patrol areas on and adjacent to campus.
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