The Evolution of Alcohol

I am a heavy drinker. According to Middlebury College, I fall squarely into the 11 percent of students that consumed 10 or more drinks in one sitting in the previous two weeks. How interesting. This has always been a topic I have been interested in, though lately it has become more of a fascination. Not me drinking — just the culture of it on campus. I need to start at the beginning to explain myself.

Wind the clocks back to my later years in high school, roughly three years ago. I grew up in Toronto where the drinking age is the far more accessible 19. Alcohol was a part of my social life from approximately age 14 or 15 onward. From then to the time I graduated it was a fairly normal thing to go out on the weekends and have alcohol. By the end of high school, going to the bar with friends was a fairly regular occurrence.

Now, even with the drinking age at 19, what I was doing was technically illegal and mistakes were made. I drank myself sick, I made bad decisions; I did all the things you would expect from a teenage boy. But, by the end of it all, these things stopped happening. Vomiting into toilets became less and less acceptable and beer replaced most of the liquor.

By the time I came to Middlebury, I would argue I was familiar with drinking. Understand my frustration when I arrived on campus as a new Feb last year only to find that lo and behold, nobody had any real alcohol experience. People had an innate fear of Public Safety when I was more worried about cops; others insisted on drinking liquor when I was more comfortable with beer.

People did dangerous things: it was terrifying to see people with no alcohol experience drinking vodka like water. It makes you want to scream, “you’re doing that wrong!” Yet, my culture started to change along with this. It only took me two weekends of wandering between social houses to pull aside my roommate and say, “we need to start making our own fun.”

My close friends and I got really “good” at drinking. We knew how to get alcohol and how to avoid Public Safety. It basically meant consuming large amounts of liquor without playing music too loud and never having a drink in your hand. Not exactly a healthy culture.

Fast forward a year and we have grown up. We got bored with getting drunk in our room, but are still fairly disappointed with the noise and claustrophobia of social houses. Among my friends I would say yes, I drink a lot. I’m also male, 6’2, 175 pounds and eat large meals before any night I know I’m going to be drinking.

I can hardly say that the drinking culture at Middlebury is “good” or “healthy.” Certain aspects I really enjoy. Public Safety as individuals are some of the most responsible and caring people I know on campus. Except for a few exceptions, they draw a good line between telling you to shut up because it is 2 a.m. and getting actively involved in what could potentially be a dangerous situation.

Yet, I feel torn because their job and the responsibility of the College is inherently one that contradicts itself. The question of how the school upholds its legal obligations while still fundamentally caring for its students will always be the heart of this debate.

My fascination with this subject comes to a head with a situation my social group dealt with recently. A friend was brought to our home on campus in an incredibly incapacitated state. Others in the room were sober; I was asleep. The crucial part of this story is that a friend of mine was able to assess the situation and, given his experience with alcohol, was able to determine “we need to call Public Safety and an EMT, now.”

I am not sure he would have had this knowledge and confidence without having the somewhat tumultuous first-year drinking experience my friend group went through. It does not have to be this way. In all kinds of ways my experience could have gone terribly wrong. I wish it was not this way, and that this education through experience could be eliminated. I fear that given current college policies, this is not the case and the College maintains the unrealistic expectation of abstention. With any luck, we can establish more candid discussions concerning how we imbibe and how the College chooses to act.