A shot of American culture

Every March, when intoxicated spring breakers from the United States invade Marcelo Miretti's native Mexico, he stops going out at night. The College junior just can't stand the vibe they bring south of the border.

"The American students will go to a club in Mexico at 11 and by one, when the Mexican kids are just getting there, the Americans will be passing out already," he says.

Like many of Penn's international students, Miretti cannot understand the role alcohol plays in the United States. He scoffs at the jubilation the word "alcohol" arouses in most U.S. teenagers, and especially scorns the collegiate adage, "I don't like drinking but I like to be drunk."

To these international students, keg stands, beer bongs and frat-wide Beirut tournaments are all foreign concepts.

With Mexico's drinking age set at 18, Miretti has been legal for over two years, and even before that, his parents regularly served beer and wine with meals.

Miretti's friend, Engineering junior Sebastian von Berg, shared a similar experience growing up in Argentina. He could not understand the "pregaming" he witnessed at Penn as a freshman.

"'Pregame' is such a strange word," von Berg says. "I only learned it when I got here."

But learn it he did. "In my hall freshman year, it was literally just sit in a circle and drink from a bottle that was passed around," he says.

Needless to say, he didn't party there long. Instead, he gravitated toward other international students, who shared a similar attitude toward alcohol: drinking should not be the entire focus of an evening.

"You don't just drink," von Berg says. "You drink while you're doing something else like playing pool, talking with friends or dancing."

Von Berg's suite in the Latin-American Program of Harnwell College House sponsors parties where alcohol flows as freely as in the pregaming-obsessed Quad halls.

"Kids around the world think they'll enjoy a party more if they're drinking," von Berg says.

Vodka and rum are often staples at these parties, although beer is also available for those who don't like the hard stuff. But don't expect to find American favorites Natty Ice or the Beast. Von Berg and his suitemates buy Mexican beers like Corona, Dos Equis and Negro Modelo.

"Only in extreme cases will we buy MGD," says Miretti, emphasizing the word "extreme" and shaking his head and hands in mock despair.

This is not to say that Miretti's crew boycotts frats. They go, admittedly, but infrequently. "The idea of going to a frat house, if you don't know anybody, to get their free cheap liquor is not appealing to me," says Engineering junior Gabriel Jinich, who grew up in Mexico.

College freshman Tovah Mizrachi hardly ever frequents frats. "I don't like frats because the only thing to drink is beer and I hate beer," she says. "I only drink alcohol that I like because I drink for the flavor."

Growing up in Panama, where they loosely enforce the drinking age of 18, alcohol was never a taboo for Mizrachi. "Legally we had our restrictions, but in practice we didn't," she says. "We could get alcohol whenever we wanted -- with our parents, at bars, at clubs."

At age 16, Mizrachi and her friends killed off a bottle of her father's alcohol. "My parents didn't know I was drinking at the time, but the next day I was like, 'Daddy, I finished your bottle of whatever,'" Mizrachi says.

There were no consequences.

Because of this attitude, Mizrachi says she views alcohol differently than many of her U.S. counterparts. "People here drink to get drunk and prove that they are alone and can do whatever they want," she says. "It's not new for me, so I don't treat alcohol that way."

But Mizrachi and von Berg acknowledge U.S. and international students both get drunk, noting that the difference lies in the process. "It's not like nobody gets shitfaced" in Argentina," he says. "People get drunk like they get drunk here."

When College and Wharton junior Mike Hepinstall went abroad to Germany his sophomore year, he was surprised by the legal age of 16. "It was a difference realizing that I could go to the grocery store and bring home beer," he says. "I felt almost guilty the first couple of times."

He says going out to pubs is commonplace there, yet he never witnessed public inebriation comparable to students stumbling back to the dorms in the Quad. "I never saw a university student who was drunk to the point of it being easily noticeable," Hepinstall says.

But a Justice Department paper, citing the 1995 European School Survey Project On Alcohol and Other Drugs, provides evidence refuting the notion that Americans abuse alcohol more than Europeans. "About half of the European countries in the survey had higher prevalence rates for self-reported intoxication," the report states.

But Hepinstall still says that the drinking age in the United States contributes to an overall problem with alcohol. "By lowering the drinking age, [the Germans] keep it from becoming a law that you disrespect," he says.

Hepinstall adds that it is "considered by Germans a bit of a tyrannical policy on the part of the U.S. government to keep its citizens from having such freedoms as alcohol."

But Stephanie Ives, Penn's director of alcohol policy initiatives, disagrees. She opposes lowering the U.S. drinking age, citing both the Justice Department survey and other statistics from Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

"When the drinking age was raised to 21 across the nation, the number of alcohol related car accidents and deaths was reduced," Ives says. "I think it would be difficult to prepare an argument to lower the drinking age when that positive outcome is at risk."

Ives also doubts if lowering the U.S. drinking age truly would eliminate alcohol abuse. "I wonder if in Europe, where the drinking age is lower, the problems we see with our 16 to 20 year olds are the same that they see in their 12 to 15 year olds," Ives says.

In some ways, Jinich's personal experience in Mexico substantiates Ives theory. "Most of the stumbling and puking drunk happened when we were 14 or 15," he says.

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