On the Right - Let's Drink to It.(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 27

To what? Anything. In the current Alumni Magazine from Yale, a 20-year- old sophomore (Miss Kara Lowentheil does not herself drink) says of her classmates that "they're very funny, very bright, very interesting, motivated, and intelligent people." And they are "hardly at the brink of despair and isolation. Apart from weekend nights, when they resemble nothing so much as a bunch of inebriated chimpanzees."

At Harvard, Prof. Henry Wechsler's landmark college-alcohol study revealed that binge drinking on college campuses was much more extensive than anyone believed. "Our society has taken alcohol as a rite of passage. It's like living next to a fish factory-after a while you don't smell it anymore."

Writing three years ago at Princeton, undergraduate Wes Tooke rejected the easygoing assumption that it was always so, as witness, e.g., F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose citation is not reassuring given that he died of drink. (The implication is that if you write The Great Gatsby, it's okay to go on and die from booze.) It was not always so, wrote Tooke, drinking is more intense today. Statistics from the Princeton Health Center record that the number of students treated for alcohol poisoning more than doubled between 1983 and 1999.

What to do? There is a hard libertarian edge out there that can't be entirely ignored. One Princeton student, a former varsity athlete and a campus leader, said it in so many words: "I am 20 years old. What I choose to do at two in the morning in my club is my business."

There isn't really a consensus on society vs. the college drinker. There are great swings in attitude on what, if anything, should be done about it. At the University of Rhode Island recently, one fraternity voted to go dry. But that sounds like Prohibition as an answer to alcoholism. Professor Wechsler defines the binge drinker as the male who consumes five drinks in an evening, the female who has four. In contrast, some universities opt to help to mitigate the problem through a sequestration of sorts. If you confine the kids' drinking to the college area, they will ...