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SPH study documents college drinking hazards to campus communities
By Brian Fitzgerald
It was a Halloween that changed the lives of several families forever.
On October 31, 1997, a car driven by a drunk Virginia Tech freshman, traveling
out of control at 85 miles an hour, hit another car head on in Christiansburg,
Va., leaving three people dead, including the driver, Matthew West. The
accident captured the attention of Ralph Hingson because it took the lives
not only of two college students, but also of a college professor in the
other vehicle. For Hingson, the crash illustrates the pervasiveness of
tragedies related to binge drinking in college.
While the hazards of the problem are well documented, and the grim details
reported in newspapers -- vandalism, alcohol poisoning, assault, sexual
assault, and drunk driving crashes -- Hingson says the public still has
a hard time coming to grips with the severity of the issue in terms of
sheer numbers. However, recent research by the BU School of Public Health
professor and his colleagues examines for the first time all college student
deaths from excessive alcohol use in a single year.
And the effects of college drinking are much more destructive than commonly
realized, says Hingson, who presented their report, "The Magnitude
of Alcohol-Related Mortality and Morbidity among U.S. College Students
Ages 18-24," at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April
9. The research, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, reveals
that an average of 1,400 college students are killed each year in alcohol-related
accidents.
In addition to causing the fatalities, alcohol is involved in about 600,000
assaults among students, more than 500,000 unintentional injuries, and
more than 70,000 sexual assaults among students each year. "When
you think about it, those are pretty daunting figures," says Hingson.
"In terms of the number of assaults, that's about the equivalent
of the population of Boston getting hit in the head with a baseball bat."
In addition, 400,000 college students a year reported having unprotected
sex as a result of drinking.
Hingson and researchers from BU, the Harvard University School of Public
Health, and the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
derived their data by integrating a number of national databases containing
information about drinking and its consequences. Their study appears in
the March 2002 issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol.
"By documenting the magnitude of this problem," says Hingson,
"we can help academic institutions stimulate and target efforts to
reduce drinking. It can also serve as a baseline against which to measure
progress in achieving this goal."
Hingson dedicated the study to Radford University student Jonathan Levy,
one of the victims in the Halloween crash in Virginia. "Ironically,
when these students were party hopping, their car slammed into a car driven
by Dr. Margaret Moore, a Radford University professor, who a month before
had gotten her Ph.D. When I asked if I could dedicate the article to Jonathan,
I had no idea of the whole story. What struck home was that all segments
of the college community are affected by this behavior." Another
passenger in West's car remains in a rehabilitation facility after suffering
severe injuries, including brain damage, blindness in one eye, and the
loss of part of a foot. A few weeks later, distraught over Levy's death,
one of his best friends committed suicide.
"One of the messages that I hope gets across," says Hingson,
"is that it's not just the harm that the drinking students are causing
themselves, but that there are a lot of people who aren't drinking who
are injured or killed as a result of college students drinking."
Indeed, Moore did not use alcohol. But, because of the poor judgment of
an impaired driver, her substance-free lifestyle couldn't prevent her
from being killed in a drunk driving accident.
Hingson's study is the centerpiece of the National Institute on Alcohol
Abuse (NIAA) Task Force on College Drinking report A Call to Action: Changing
the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges, which was also presented on
April 9. "The panels that we met with, which included college presidents,
students, and scientists, were informed that there are a lot of factors
that we know, based on solid research, that can make a difference,"
says Hingson. "One of the most promising aspects to come out of this
is that while we don't have a silver bullet, we do have a good platform
on which to begin."
Hingson recommends that academic institutions increase interventions to
reduce college drinking and related problems, including individually oriented
prevention and treatment strategies, environmental alcohol regulations,
stronger drunk driving laws, social norms marketing campaigns, and more
comprehensive community-campus partnerships. He also calls for increasing
the price of alcohol, eliminating cheap alcohol promotions, and reducing
the number of liquor stores and bars.
Hingson says that cracking down on fake IDs, which law enforcement officials
believe are on the rise because computer programs make the process fairly
simple, is an essential step. Levy's father, Jeffrey Levy, who is on the
board of directors of the Northern Virginia chapter of Mothers Against
Drunk Driving, lobbied heavily to get an Intelli-check machine -- a device
that can read bar codes to determine if they're legitimate -- for Arlington
County.
Nonetheless, according to the NIAA Task Force, much more needs to be done.
"The consequences of excessive drinking are far too common on many
college campuses nationwide, and the efforts to reduce high-risk drinking
and its related problems have largely failed," says Mark Goldman,
a psychology professor at the University of Florida and task force cochair.
"But we need not accept high-risk drinking on our campuses as inevitable.
If colleges and communities work together, they can change these harmful
drinking patterns. We hope this report will help them do that, by providing
tools to help them make more informed decisions."
19 April 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations