Drugs and alcohol go hand in hand with university life. It’s become a joke—party your brains out, get up and go to class, rinse and repeat. Toss in a tailgate party and an all-nighter at the library and you’ve got the ingredients for the average college experience.
Drugs and alcohol go hand in hand with university life. It’s become a joke—party your brains out, get up and go to class, rinse and repeat. Toss in a tailgate party and an all-nighter at the library and you’ve got the ingredients for the average college experience.
When did that become our coming-of-age story? It’s ironic that we’re supposed to be feeding and stimulating our minds and at the same time killing the very brain cells we use to learn.
But it’s not just brain cells. According to a Betty Ford Center report, close to 2,000 students in the U.S. die of alcohol-related causes every year and almost 600,000 students are injured due to the effects of alcohol. It’s tragic if even one student with his whole life ahead of him dies in this way, let alone 2,000. So why is excessive drinking still a joke?
Evidently, it’s no laughing matter at some universities, and they’re doing what they can to lower the statistics. More and more institutions are now offering separate, “dry” housing on campus. Students struggling with alcoholism and addiction can live in strict, substance-free dorms where they collectively abstain from alcohol and drugs during their time at the university.
Rutgers University in New Jersey pioneered this model. They house students in what is known as the Recovery House. In an interview with Voice of America, founder Lisa Laitman said the house provides an escape from the “isolation associated with addiction.” Residents follow a 12-step program and attend two support meetings each week where, together, they face the challenges of remaining sober.
An anonymous Rutgers student told VOA that the friends he’d made in the house were ones that he could talk to about “personal issues,” and that previously his friendships had revolved around little else than partying and doing drugs. Clearly the idea of living in a space surrounded by a community of committed, like-minded people can help students stay on a clean and sober path.
In a culture where drugs and alcohol are as prevalent as mosquitoes in a swamp, living in a substance-free zone does sound like a good idea. Yet it brings up questions of sustainability. Certainly, four years in a tight-knit cocoon of brotherhood and sisterhood creates a recipe for sobriety, but what happens when graduation comes around and everyone’s launched into a world that doesn’t give a second thought about anyone’s addictions? What then?
Is this not setting up students for failure and providing an unrealistic context for achieving success? Take Portland, for example, where we have more breweries per capita than cars. (OK, so that’s a made-up statistic, but you get the point.) We live in a culture where social interaction is generally accompanied by some variety of brew or two, or three, or four…
Going from four years of isolation from the stuff to suddenly having non-stop access could prove too much for even the strongest person. Would it not make more sense to live in the real world and learn restraint rather than live in a bubble, never having to face your worst enemy?
Perhaps Portland State’s community living or themed floors are a more realistic idea. The First Year Experience offers themed floors to incoming students ranging from health and wellness, to cultural diversity and awareness, to substance/tobacco-free. This way students can live alongside people of similar interests but not be isolated or excluded from the broader community.
Students can develop friendships with people who share the same goals of sobriety and at the same time be surrounded by others who do not, even as close as the next floor up. This could be helpful for addicts, but also for those who want an alcohol-free university experience, to learn to live within a tempting context and still protect their own health—a valuable lesson for the rest of their lives.
At PSU, “sustainability” is a frequently used word, and in the end we can only hope that living on a substance-free floor wouldn’t be the only reason students choose responsible living. Right now, 2,000 of our peers die yearly from alcohol and that cannot—by any stretch of the imagination—be considered sustainable.
You are villainizing social practices that have been in place for thousands of years. Your stigmatization of alcohol and other drugs sounds like it’s ripped straight out of DARE propaganda. It seems sensationalist and frankly, out of touch with reality.