Collegio Online

Issue date: 4/3/08 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: AP DWI offender Paul Montoya is placed in retraints as Belen, N.M., high school seniors observe his sentencing during a "Courts to Schools Program" Thursday, March 27. Magistrate Daniel Hawkes brought his courtroom to the school in hopes that the proceedings will show students the dangers of alcohol, especially in the weeks leading up to prom and graduation.

It's something I've never fully understood. With all the lectures offered by drunken drivers who've killed strangers, their friends, their family; with the arrests and the fights and the illnesses and the wrecks and the losses so many of us have known; with the constant barrage of educational materials and programs we're exposed to in our schools, why do so many of us continue to drink to get drunk, to build our social events around alcohol consumption?

Over the last few years, I've written a number of articles on alcohol abuse. In 2005, I asked PSU's health and wellness coordinator, JT Knoll, why it is that college students can continue to drink in the face of more-than-apparent personal consequences.

"That's the $64,000 question," he said. "That's why people in Alcoholics Anonymous often describe the problem as baffling, powerful and cunning."

Knoll spoke of denial being an integral part of a young person's psychic makeup, that many otherwise intelligent people continue to drink in an abusive manner because it takes so long for emerging adults to develop the parts of their brains that process good judgment.

"Add alcohol to the situation," Knoll said, "and you'll find a gradual decrease in a person's ability to think logically."
Knoll pointed out that while those people addicted to alcohol "drink to feel normal," college students who choose to drink excessively (on average, more than two beers in one hour) are often under the influence of peer pressure, environment and a well-documented feeling of euphoria inherent in the substance's chemical effect on the brain.

Of course, as a person who does not drink, I have little real understanding of the mindset that comes with more traditional forms of college "partying." I am not familiar with the euphoria of which so many peers speak, the intoxicating joy of, well, intoxication.

Continued...

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