The Wave Of Drunkenness On American College Campuses

The Wave Of Drunkenness On American College Campuses.
With alcohol-related deaths and injuries rising on US college campuses, college officials are fatiguing various ways to quell the tide of sorrowful drinking. One effort that targeted off-campus boozing shows some promise, researchers say. A program at a bunch of public universities in California commission the level of heavy drinking at private parties and other locations by 6 percent, researchers communication in the December issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The so-called Safer California Universities lessons included measures such as stricter enforcement of local nuisance ordinances, police-run seduce operations, driving-under-the-influence checkpoints, and use of campus and local media to spread the warrant 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 ambition was to reduce the number of big parties, which are more likely to involve threatening 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 mythos about college drinking that nothing works, and that if you do attempt to increase enforcement, students will just find some direction around it. But now we have direct evidence that these kinds of interventions can have a fairly significant impact".

Eight campuses of the University of California and six campuses in the California State University group were involved in the study. Half the schools were randomly assigned to the Safer program, which took force the fall semesters of 2005 and 2006. Student surveys were completed by undergrads in four diminish semesters (2003 through 2006), and researchers analyzed samples of 1000 to 2000 students per campus per year.