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College tradition, teaching freshmen to drink

Oct 4, 2012, 2:11 AM | Updated: 5:39 pm

Listen to College tradition – teaching the freshmen how to drink

It’s a tradition on college campuses across the country that parents would rather not know about. Older students teach the freshmen how to drink.

Though under the legal drinking age, many freshmen try beer and alcohol for the first time in college. A few University of Washington students want to make sure the newbies learn how to drink responsibly.

DrinkingGirlsClasses have been underway at the UW since September 24 and for some students that’s meant a couple of weeks of partying in between classes.

Students tell me Thursday is a big drinking night for parties because a lot of third and fourth year students don’t have UW classes on Friday.

I was the not-cool-mom at a recent off campus party, noticing some things don’t change with beer pong and red plastic cups.

What’s in the cups?

“Mostly filled with light beer, cheap beer, Rolling Rock or Rainier,” says Ian Cameron. “Maybe some cheap plastic bottle vodka, and maybe if it’s a bigger party someone would have thought to make Jello shots.”

“Jungle juice,” which Holden Taylor explains is “vodka, beer, and frozen lemonade” making the drink “as sweet as possible to hide as much of the taste of alcohol as possible,” is also an option.

Cameron and Taylor are juniors at the UW, they consider themselves casual drinkers, but they’re concerned about underclassmen who are taught how to drink, but not necessarily how to drink responsibly.

“If you bring a younger kid to a party and they’re getting out of hand, most people see it as their responsibility to take care of him,” says Taylor.

“For sure,” adds Cameron. “You’re tied to them. Your fate is intertwined with them for the night.”

There are unwritten rules like that one, and then there are the rules Cameron and Taylor are trying to reinforce like “don’t drink and drive.” Too many students get in cars with drunk drivers.

“Forty percent of undergraduates report they got in a car with a driver who had consumed alcohol that night. To me that’s just shocking because I’ve never done that,” Cameron says.

Both juniors want there to be more of a “stigma” about drunk driving.

“People aren’t going to be like, ‘Yeah man we were driving drunk last weekend and it was sick’ but people also don’t go to a party and say, ‘Dude, you guys were drunk driving last night and that’s not alright,'” says Cameron.

He says some students don’t even get what a designated driver is.

“Your designated driver cannot drink,” he says. Seems obvious but some older teens don’t think through that it’s not a good idea to pick a driver at the end of the night based on who’s the least drunk.

Cameron wrote an opinion piece for the UW Daily, urging classmates not to “participate in party talk that downplays the danger of drinking and driving. Talk to those who openly claim to have driven drunk without shame; ask them where their selfish, criminal disregard for the safety of others comes from.”

He concludes, “Communities can be almost as effective in deterring such activities as law enforcement can, and with any luck, the UW class of 2016 will learn how to party safely.”

Among people aged 18 to 25, just under 40 percent binged on alcohol in the past month, according to the newly released 2011 results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

While 31 percent in that age group binge drank – meaning five or more drinks on one occasion -in the last month, about 53 percent report they had no alcohol at all.

By LINDA THOMAS, a mom who thinks about these things because my daughter is going off to college next fall.

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