Darcy Richie: Treating our drinking habits honestly

In one week, droves of Penn students will be whisked off to far-away lands, islands and cruises for a spring break week of blissful inebriation, friends and flings, and nights filled with four or more drinks: in other words, an extended Penn weekend.

We've all seen the signs posted around campus, talked about them in class and drawn our own conclusions as to whether Penn students really have four or fewer drinks when they go out at night. Next week during spring break, perhaps a light will beam down from the sky and illuminate the reality that Penn students are serious drinkers, and this "four or fewer" campaign is not the answer to binge drinking.

Schools across the country are jumping on the "four drinks or fewer" bandwagon -- which is based on a few studies out of Harvard University -- in an attempt to curb the epidemic of undergraduate binge drinking. These types of social norm campaigns try to ward off small-group peer pressure by presenting a larger marketing strategy that tells undergraduates that they will be "normal" or in the majority if they limit their drinks to four or fewer.

The study claims that students tend to overestimate the number of drinks their peers consume on a regular party night -- the same friends that scream their name, slap them five and toss them a drink in each hand when they walk into the dorm room. We might miscalculate the number of drinks our friends have, but this study assumes that students honestly don't want to drink and that undergraduates drink simply to fit in to our concept of the "majority." As if we would smile in relief after finding out that those double-fisting friends were actually drinking Coke the whole time.

Here at Penn, the Office of Health Education has taken admirable steps to try and curb the drinking habits of undergraduates by debunking myths about the pervasiveness of drinking and the reasons behind its abuse. But with the basis of the anti-drinking campaign still circulating around a battle to adjust social norms, the fight is lost from their end.

Penn students pregame with friends an hour after happy hour and four hours before they plan on heading to clubs, off-campus parties, frat parties or a tiny little room in High Rise East. I don't think in a place where "pregaming" spans from 5:45 to 10:15 -- even during more conservative weeks heavily packed with midterms -- that the limit is really four drinks or less and the motivation is simply to fit in. College students are more likely motivated by the unbiased, desegregated bonds that evolve over mixed drinks or the reckless carelessness that comes with a general naivet‚ than they are by a simplistic drive to belong.

Granted, though the target audience for the campaign seems to be freshmen or those undergraduates struggling with the weight of peer pressure, give us some credit. Many undergraduates have the ability to say no, and because of this ability -- one that our parents rely on in sending us to college -- the sentiment is very clear. We have very little desire to let this campaign direct our actions.

Honestly, undergraduate drinking is, on many levels, a legitimate area of concern. The motivation behind the campaign is the seemingly numbing indifference of undergraduates to our own vulnerability. However, though we might laugh at the campaign while we move on to our fifth drink, notice the nervous laughter when we are presented with the difference between our internal organs at 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon and the dripping, mucusy objects we might be able to identify as organs at 3 a.m. on the following Saturday morning.

A more personal connection to the statistics might incite the self-evaluation that the "four or fewer" campaigns don't. Talk to us about our own drinking, not that of others. The Office of Health Education states that research out of Indiana State University indicates, "31 percent of college students met criteria for diagnosis of alcohol abuse, and six percent for a diagnosis of alcohol dependence in the past 12 months." Indiana State isn't Penn, but the research was done on colleges across the country -- meaning that we need to evaluate our own dependence.

Our drinking might guarantee our chance of having unprotected sex and exposure to the abundance of STDs floating around the dorm rooms and off-campus houses and might guarantee our membership among the 100,000 students who report having been too intoxicated to know if they have had sex. Perhaps the answer is not to change the perception, but to address the reality that college students drink too much -- and to throw that reality back in our faces.

Darcy Richie is a senior urban studies major from Birmingham, Mich. Strange Fruit appears on Wednesdays.

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