The Wave Of Drunkenness On American College Campuses. Part 1 of 3

The Wave Of Drunkenness On American College Campuses. With alcohol-related deaths and injuries rising on US college campuses, college officials are demanding various ways to peduncle the tide of heavy drinking. One effort that targeted off-campus boozing shows some promise, researchers say. A program at a group of public universities in California hew down the level of heavy drinking at private parties and other locations by 6 percent, researchers report in the December issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The so-called Safer California Universities swatting included measures such as stricter enforcement of local nuisance ordinances, police-run decoy operations, driving-under-the-influence checkpoints, and use of campus and local media to spread the data about the crackdown.

It’s one of the first studies of college drinking that focuses on the environment rather than on prevention aimed at individuals, the researchers said. “The goal was to reduce the number of big parties, which are more likely to involve overflowing drinking,” said lead author Robert F Saltz, senior research scientist at the Prevention Research Center, Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Berkeley, Calif.

And “There’s this lore about college drinking that nothing works, and that if you do try to increase enforcement, students will just find some way around it. But now we have direct evidence that these kinds of interventions can have a fairly significant impact”.

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