Binge Drinking

The girls slumped in wheelchairs look barely conscious, their blond heads lolling above the plastic vomit bags tied like bibs around their necks. It's an hour to midnight on Friday, and the two girls, who look no older than 18, are being wheeled from an ambulance to a clinic set up discreetly in a dark alley in London's Soho entertainment district. They're the first of many to be picked up on this night by the ambulance, known as a "booze bus," and carried to the clinic — both government services dedicated to keeping drunk people out of trouble, and out of emergency rooms.

The girls slumped in wheelchairs look barely conscious, their blond heads lolling above the plastic vomit bags tied like bibs around their necks. It's an hour to midnight on Friday, and the two girls, who look no older than 18, are being wheeled from an ambulance to a clinic set up discreetly in a dark alley in London's Soho entertainment district. They're the first of many to be picked up on this night by the ambulance, known as a "booze bus," and carried to the clinic — both government services dedicated to keeping drunk people out of trouble, and out of emergency rooms.

A question that has vexed college administrators since John Belushi shambled on screen in "Animal House" - what to do about heavy drinking by students - may have a new answer. A study of 30 campuses nationwide found that an online educational course that showed students in attention-grabbing detail the consequences of excessive drinking had significantly reduced common alcohol-related problems among freshmen, including binge drinking and sexual assault. The results, published in July in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, also showed that students who completed the program were less...

We think of anthropology as the study of faraway cultures, but sometimes, the most useful truths are close to home. So it might be at Dartmouth College, where a group of anthropology students is deep at work this semester, trying to figure out why college students drink too much. In general, binge drinking isn't seen as a mystery so much as an age-old fact, for which the response tends to range from "kids will be kids" to "woe is us. " Blame is often laid on immutable facts; a recent Rolling Stone article laid Dartmouth's heavy-drinking culture on the fact that there's not much to do in...

Salon interviews Thomas Vander Ven, author of Getting Wasted , about binge drinking in college. Dr. Vander Ven bypasses moralism and the current focus on brain biology to look at the social function that binge drinking fulfills for college students:  They're more likely to say and do things [when they drink] that they normally wouldn't do -- show affection to their peers, get angry at them, get more emboldened to sing and dance and take risks and act crazy and there's a ton of laughing that goes on. It creates this world of adventure.

We think of anthropology as the study of faraway cultures, but sometimes, the most useful truths are close to home. So it might be at Dartmouth College, where a group of anthropology students is deep at work this semester, trying to figure out why college students drink too much. In general, binge drinking isn't seen as a mystery so much as an age-old fact, for which the response tends to range from "kids will be kids" to "woe is us. " Blame is often laid on immutable facts; a recent Rolling Stone article laid Dartmouth's heavy-drinking culture on the fact that...

HANOVER, N.H. — Using the same approach he once used to treat tuberculosis in Peru, the president of Dartmouth College is leading a national initiative to reduce binge drinking: a learning collaborative focused on measuring what works in one place and sharing it elsewhere. Thirteen other colleges and universities have signed on to the project that Jim Yong Kim announced yesterday, but officials expect to increase the total to about 20 before it gets underway next month. The project will bring together teams from each campus three times in 18 months to share their...

Everyone knows that college students binge drink -- especially those who join fraternities -- but what about young married couples living in the suburbs with incomes over $75,000 a year? Or medical students? Or seniors? Those groups account for the highest frequency of binge drinkers along with those young adult males, according to a new report issued today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Relying on household surveys conducted in nearly all states, the CDC found that about 1 in 6 Americans binge drink, on average about four times a month.

FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- By the time the rainy night stretched into early morning, Samantha Spady had been drinking and partying for hours. Earlier it was beer and shots of tequila. Inside a fraternity house, she was swilling vanilla vodka from a bottle. The binge had gone on for 11 hours. When it was over, the Colorado State student's blood-alcohol level was more than five times the limit Colorado allows when driving. She was stumbling, unable to stand on her own. Two students wrapped the 19-year-old's limp arms around their necks and walked her to a forgotten fraternity...

FROSTBURG, Md. - It's dime draft night every Thursday at the Diamond Lounge on Main Street, and a dozen or so glassy-eyed students are milling around outside as Lieutenant Kevin Grove's patrol car passes by. He hangs a right on Bowery Street, the main drag for off-campus social life at Frostburg State University. A few students are walking - some stumbling - up the hill. On porches and through windows, they are visibly holding bottles. But Grove keeps driving. He is looking for fights, accidents, and vandalism.

THE STORIES that came out this winter about the extent of fraternity hazing at Dartmouth College are shocking and disgusting: students forced to wade in kiddie pools full of excrement, eat omelets made of vomit, and drink beer poured down other students' rear ends. They are also, to some degree, of dubious sourcing. Andrew Lohse, the student who outlined those tales in a student newspaper op-ed — and is now collaborating on a story for Rolling Stone — has a history of incendiary writings and a sorry record as a fraternity member, post-pledge.

Everyone knows college students binge drink - especially in fraternities - but what about young married couples in the suburbs with incomes over $75,000 a year? Or medical students? Or seniors? Those groups account for the highest frequency of binge drinkers along with young adult males, according to a report issued last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Relying on household surveys conducted in nearly all states, the CDC found that about 1 in 6 Americans binge drink, on average about four times a month.

ATLANTA - College-age drinkers average nine drinks when they get drunk, government health officials said yesterday. That surprising statistic is part of a new report highlighting the dangers of binge drinking, which usually means four to five drinks at a time. Overall, about 1 in 6 US adults surveyed said they had binged on alcohol at least once in the previous month, though it was more than 1 in 4 for those ages 18 to 34. And that's probably an underestimate: Alcohol sales figures suggest people are buying a lot more alcohol than they say they are consuming.

An insurance company study says Rhode Island is the 10th healthiest state in the nation, but heavy drinking and childhood poverty remain stubborn public health concerns. The report gives the Ocean State good scores for high childhood immunization rates, low numbers of uninsured residents and good access to primary care physicians. But the report notes that 20 percent of the state's children live in poverty, and says too many Rhode Islanders engage in binge drinking. Rhode Island's 10th place finish is unchanged from last year's rankings.

The toll of excessive drinking works out to about $2 per drink, in terms of medical expenses and other costs to society, according to a new federal research. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study calculated societal costs from binge and heavy drinking beyond what consumers pay at the bar or liquor store. It's the first such federal estimate in more than a dozen years. The study looked at costs that included — among other things — lost work productivity, property damage from car crashes, expenditures for liver cirrhosis and other alcohol-associated medical...

Drunken driving incidents have fallen 30 percent in the last five years, and last year were at their lowest mark in nearly two decades, according to a new federal report. The decline may be due to the down economy: Other research suggests people are still drinking as heavily as in years past, so some may just be finding cheaper ways of imbibing than by going to bars, night clubs and restaurants. "One possibility is that people are drinking at home more and driving less after drinking," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control...

College-age drinkers average nine drinks when they get drunk, government health officials said Tuesday. That surprising statistic is part of a new report highlighting the dangers of binge drinking, which usually means four to five drinks at a time. Overall, about 1 in 6 U.S. adults surveyed said they had binged on alcohol at least once in the previous month, though it was more than 1 in 4 for those ages 18 to 34. And that's likely an underestimate: Alcohol sales figures suggest people are buying a lot more alcohol than they say they are consuming.