TUESDAY, April 9, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- On any given day, alcohol is responsible for the deaths of nearly four college students, injuries to another 1,370, and almost 200 sexual assaults.
That's the sobering conclusion of a new government survey on alcohol's dangerous grip on the nation's campuses.
"These numbers paint a picture of a deeply entrenched threat to the health and well-being of our young people," Dr. Raynard S. Kington, acting director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, said in a statement today.
The findings appear in the March issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol. They were also presented today in Washington, D.C., at a press conference for the Task Force on College Drinking, which commissioned the research.
Alcohol claimed the lives of more than 1,400 students in 1998 -- 1,100 in traffic accidents -- caused 500,000 injuries, and led to 70,000 sexual attacks and date rapes, the study found. More than 600,000 students reported being assaulted by a drunken student.
Dr. Marc Schuckit, an alcohol expert at the VA San Diego Healthcare System, and editor of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol, said the results should raise alarms among parents and campus officials who don't believe college drinking is a significant problem.
"These pretty highly functional kids are having a lot of trouble from alcohol. The colleges might not be paying as much attention as they should to some pretty serious consequences of college drinking," Schuckit said.
The study extrapolated national accident statistics to the campuses, using the percentage of people between the ages of 18 and 24 who are enrolled in college. The researchers also reviewed survey results from both students and non-students to find out rates of binge drinking, drunken driving, assaults, and injuries while intoxicated.
Some 3,200 non-students in the 18-to-24 age range died in 1998 of injuries associated with drinking. College students make up almost a third of this group, and the researchers said they assumed the overall death rate associated with alcohol was the same for students and non-students.
"We didn't want to inflate the figures," said Ralph Hingson, a Boston University alcohol researcher and lead author of the study.
Yet college students are more likely than their non-student peers to say they binge drink -- about 40 percent of students say they consumed five or more drinks at a time (four or more for women) at least once in the last month -- and a quarter admit to driving while intoxicated. As a result, Hingson said, his group believes their estimates for deaths among students are likely conservative.
Anthony Tommasello, a substance abuse expert at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, said the number of deaths "sounds high." But, he added, "given the strong relationship between binge drinking and fatal auto crashes, and the high incidence of binge drinking among college students, it may be plausible."
Heavy drinking on campus is a serious but not insurmountable problem, Hingson said. Counseling, especially at emergency rooms and trauma centers, has been shown to reduce repeat injuries related to alcohol.
Campus restrictions on alcohol consumption, especially those that target underage drinkers, are also helpful. So, too, are partnerships between schools and the communities and merchants that surround them to raise awareness of alcoholism and problem drinking.
To reduce the toll of drunken driving, Hingson said states need to lower the legal blood alcohol limit to 0.08 from 0.10 (32 have so far), aggressively enforce seat belt laws and give police the power to strip licenses from people caught intoxicated behind the wheel.
States should also consider raising the price of alcohol, although he admits that this step would punish poor citizens who enjoy alcohol casually. "If you raise prices, it has a particular effect on younger people," who don't earn enough money to absorb the increase.
William Burns, senior policy director at the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said the latest findings "don't sound far off," given the number of students in this country (there were 8 million in 1998).
"As horrible as death statistics and injuries are, this represents the tip of an iceberg of the kinds of activities that interfere with learning," Burns said.
Part of the problem, he said, is that American higher education has lost sight of why young people should be in school. Many campuses view students as temporary tenants when they should be considered precious resources, he said.
Accidents aside, excess drinking is terribly disruptive to school work, he said -- as is worrying about what happened during a liquor-induced blackout the night before a test, or fretting over a summons for a bar fight during a lecture. "We don't really at this point value students enough. We need to have their full attention all of the time."
On the other hand, Burns said, drinking does play an important social role on campus -- and it's not clear that imposing a "dry" environment is something college administrators can or should do.
What To Do
Thursday is National Alcohol Screening Day. Alcoholism screening will be offered at more than 550 colleges and universities, and about 2,000 other sites nationwide. Find a screening site near you.
For more on the dangers of heavy drinking, try the NIAAA, which also has a page on drinking on campus.
You can also try the National Commission Against Drunk Driving.
