Help a friend know when to say when

January of my freshman year, I helped walk one of my very drunk friends back to his room. Before getting into his bed, he had already purloined restaurant glassware, stripped himself entirely naked, and punched me in the nose. After I thought he was safely tucked away, he walked out of Quad past the security guards and all the way to 30th and Walnut before being picked up by the cops -- all without a stitch of clothing. The police brought him to the emergency room, as the combination of alcohol poisoning and hypothermia had briefly stopped his heart. All of this he told me the following day when I came, at the hospital's request, to bring him clothing -- he was admitted wearing "only the plastic bag the police had given him."

That's just the short version of a story that I'm sharing to demonstrate that, yes, there is such a thing as drinking too much. And I'm sure it's just one story among many. Tales of drunkenness and its aftermath are too common on this campus, probably because of just how common drunkenness and its aftermath actually are.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm no prohibitionist. Alcohol has long been a central feature of American life. It's why Johnny Appleseed was famous. The Whiskey Rebellion was the first serious challenge to our Constitution. Sure, we outlawed the stuff for a while, but that didn't last long. Similarly, alcohol has long been, and will likely continue to be, a central feature of campus culture. For better or worse, the social centers on campus are those places where alcohol is served: fraternities, Beige Block parties, and Smokey Joe's.

But the centrality of alcohol to campus life at Penn and elsewhere does not itself explain why some students drink to the point of hurting themselves, or why some students do so repeatedly. I propose that this is, at least in part, the result of a social norm that says that the welfare of our friends and neighbors is entirely in their own hands. Sometimes friends need friends to cut them off from further drinking, and sometimes bad things happen when they don't.

Some argue that the consumption of alcohol is purely a question of individual consequences and thus individual responsibilities. I disagree. That may be true in a world where individuals live by themselves, drink by themselves, clean up after themselves, and nurse hangovers by themselves. Besides being unhealthy, that's just not the world in which we live.

Society is more than a collection of individuals. It is an interwoven collection of communities, and those communities of friends, neighbors and classmates all bear the consequences of excessive drinking.

They bear the consequences when obnoxious drunk freshmen crash private parties and drink up the hosts' alcohol, as happened to some of my friends this weekend. They bear the consequences when stepping around vomit in elevators. They bear the consequences when walking friends home, when holding trash cans and when fetching vitamins and water. They bear the consequences when dealing with others' hangovers and resulting crankiness. They bear the consequences when friends don't come home and cause worry or when hospitals call asking you to bring clothing.

I'm certainly not making a claim on sainthood. I've held trash cans, but trash cans have also been held for me by people whom I cannot thank or apologize to nearly enough. An hour of kneeling at the porcelain oracle will quickly elicit oaths of eternal sobriety, but in my experience and in the experience of my friends, such vows rarely survive the next weekend. However, being on the sober end of karmic payback really does ingrain an appreciation of the impact of one's own drunken escapades on others.

Of course, individuals should themselves be responsible for their behavior, but that's not enough. We have responsibilities to our community, and our community of fellow students bears some responsibility for us. The University's alcohol policies, like the amnesty policy for those seeking medical help, are the right idea. But realistically, no policy can ever be encompassing enough to prevent either the alcohol abuse or the potentially dangerous results of that abuse that both occur regularly on this campus.

Therefore, we the members of the Penn community have an obligation to pick up where the University's policies leave off. That responsibility to our friends and classmates means drinking less to watch out for friends, and sometimes it means cutting friends off.

What our community needs are not more university regulations, but rather a campus-wide conversation in dorm rooms and at dinner tables -- a conversation about whether a friend in the group will say sober enough to keep others out of trouble and a conversation about when it's all right to tell you that you've had enough.

Without such a conversation, the dominant social norm on campus will continue to be the widespread belief that drinking is solely the drinker's problem, and that's a belief that has already sent far too many of our friends to the hospital.Kevin Collins is a junior Political Science major from Milwaukee. ...And Justice For All appears on Tuesdays.

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