Reader Responses

For those of you who do not know, a popular college fad these days is binge drinking — where college students and others intentionally get intoxicated by drinking excessive amounts of alcoholic beverages. The process of binge drinking is simple — you drink until you are drunk.

An example of binge drinking is for a person to drink a one ounce shot of beer every 60 seconds; that sounds simple enough until you figure in that’s 60 ounces of beer in an hour, equivalent to five, 12-ounce cans of beer by which most people would be considered legally intoxicated in most states. Add a few more hours of partying, during which time more beer is consumed, in no time at all, a person is too drunk to be driving, or they make themselves so sick they vomit, or they pass out, or in the worst-case scenario they die due to alcohol poisoning or accidentally kill someone in some type of accident. We all know the likely results of drunk driving so I won’t go there but I will say it can be a factor resulting from binge drinking.

Nevertheless, there are nearly 100 college presidents across the country who are urging politicians to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18. Their reasoning is that doing so will reduce or stop binge drinking. My response is that their reasoning is nonsense. Lowering the drinking age to 18 will not produce the results they hope for, and any politician who votes for such a change should be ousted from office.

Teens are going to drink on college campuses and elsewhere, no matter what age the law says is legal. But I am not a proponent of making it easier for them to do so by lowering the drinking age.

The bottom line is binge drinking is an act of pure stupidity and the results can be deadly.

Robert Russell
Tyler