How Bingeing Became the New College Sport By Barrette Seaman

In this essay Barrette Seaman argues the different approaches to supress the abuse of alcohol by the undergraduates in college. He establishes the seriousness of the issue by providing the information that 300 deaths occur from alcohol poisoning a year. He also mentions that during the time he was visiting Hamilton college several people were hospitalized from alcohol posioning including a freshman whom had consumed 22 shots of alcohol. He lets the reader know why the children abuse alcohol so much, calling it the "forbidden fruit"(491), and a way of cutting loose. He introduces the reason why the alcohol legal age limit was upped to 21. He says its because of lobbying by the mothers against drunk driving that congress blackmailed states to raise the legal age limit. Seaman shows us two approaches throughout the essay to supress alcohol abuse. The first was the one he argues against, being that laws will play their effective role in supressing undergraduates' urge to binge drink. The other approach he introduces is to reduce the age limit back to 18. He details how the abuse will increase, but only momentarily, till undergraduates treat alcohol like adults. He supports his hypothesis with Montreals Mcguil's University. This university's drinking limit is 18 and although they have the freedom to drink all of the time, around final exams they treat alcohol like adults.

I agree with Seaman's approach to binge drinking. I believe that it would take away alot of the value of alcohol for undergraduates if they can simply have it whenever they want. I've known students that have abused this drug not from just freshman year in college but freshman year in high school. I suppose students may think that it doesnt really matter how old you are when they decide to drink since even a 20 year old is under the age drinking limit. Also, I think another reason for this abuse is to just relieve stress from the pressures of their lives. I think that students should resort to less harmful drugs than alcohol to relieve them of stress. I would rather have students abuse no drugs at all but I dont think this is possible for every single student. Especially when there is so many promotions of different kinds of drugs from the media, and society. I think if the age limit is reduced to 18 for alcohol then this will impact students from the time of high school, since they will know that by the end of high school they will be able to drink. This way, by the time they reach college they will give less value to alcohol and treat it just like adults would. It would also unmotivate younger teenagers in high school to abuse it since they legal age limit would be just a few short years away.