Getting Wasted

Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard

Thomas Vander Ven

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814724149
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Most American college campuses are home to a vibrant drinking scene where students frequently get wasted, train-wrecked, obliterated, hammered, destroyed, and decimated. The terms that university students most commonly use to describe severe alcohol intoxication share a common theme: destruction, and even after repeated embarrassing, physically unpleasant, and even violent drinking episodes, students continue to go out drinking together. In Getting Wasted, Thomas Vander Ven provides a unique answer to the perennial question of why college students drink.

Vander Ven argues that college students rely on “drunk support:” contrary to most accounts of alcohol abuse as being a solitary problem of one person drinking to excess, the college drinking scene is very much a social one where students support one another through nights of drinking games, rituals and rites of passage. Drawing on over 400 student accounts, 25 intensive interviews, and one hundred hours of field research, Vander Ven sheds light on the extremely social nature of college drinking. Giving voice to college drinkers as they speak in graphic and revealing terms about the complexity of the drinking scene, Vander Ven argues that college students continue to drink heavily, even after experiencing repeated bad experiences, because of the social support that they give to one another and due to the creative ways in which they reframe and recast violent, embarrassing, and regretful drunken behaviors. Provocatively, Getting Wasted shows that college itself, closed and seemingly secure, encourages these drinking patterns and is one more example of the dark side of campus life.

1 THIS IS THE SHIT SHOW!

An Introduction to College Drinking

It’s 2:00 A.M. and the bars just closed. There are dozens of young men and women gathered in the gas station parking lot in the bar district. A young woman has fallen and she can’t get up without help from her friends. I can’t tell if she is crying or laughing. Maybe both. It’s loud out here (shouting, singing). Two young men are locked up, fighting. Each one has a hold on the other’s shirt front. A young woman (his girlfriend?) is trying to pull one of them away, pleading with him to stop. Young men stand near the fight watching. They are amused. Up and down the street people are walking (some staggering) in clusters of three to five. No one seems to notice me, even when they almost knock me down as I take notes. This feels a little like “Night of the Living Dead.” They are zombies unleashed by the bars into a world inhabited by a few sobers (me and the few cops I see out here). I wouldn’t want to have to control this. I’ve heard students refer to the Shit Show and this is it. This is the Shit Show!

(Field notes, Fall 2008)

Many college students like to get wasted, train-wrecked, obliterated, hammered, destroyed, and fucked up. The terms that university students most commonly use to describe severe alcohol intoxication share a common theme: destruction. But what is it that they are trying to destroy? Are heavy drinkers tearing down one version of their self and constructing another? Are they obliterating the boring, everyday, unproblematic world in which they live and replacing it with the Shit Show, where anything can happen? “The Shit Show”¹ refers to a chaotic drinking episode characterized by dramatic drunkenness, human wreckage, and primitive behavior. It is a party train that has gone off the rails. When students refer to the Shit Show it is with equal parts disgust and delight. Yes, things got out of hand, but in an entertaining sort of way. Here, a twenty-two-year-old male student explains the versatility of this concept:

Something always gets broken. Somebody dropped a glass, you know, somebody knocked over a cup, somebody broke our thermostat. As the night goes on people tend to get rowdier and rowdier and guys want to get in fights. Girls want to start yelling at their boyfriends. You know, that kind of stuff, as the night goes on… the funny people get funnier, either because they’re drunk or everyone else is.… It’s a good time, you know?

Collective drunkenness, then, can be a mixed bag of violence, histrionics, and good times. While the Shit Show may not represent all or even most college drinking experiences, it is a useful image. The “Show” is a wide-screen, amplified image of the duality of college drinking—it captures the euphoria and the frustration, the laughter and the vandalism, and the emergent affection and mounting violence of group intoxication. But the Shit Show is more than just a useful image; it lives in the scholarly research on college drinking as well. Thanks to a large body of data we know that, in general, college students drink a lot, and we know that getting drunk is related to a variety of negative outcomes. But why do they do it? How do they accomplish drunkenness and how do they manage its ill effects? What is the function of serial alcohol intoxication? This study is an attempt to address these questions, and more.

To be fair, some university students do not drink at all, and “getting wasted” does not describe all (or maybe even most) college drinking. Some drinkers are just looking for a nice “buzz,” and many others claim they are “responsible” drinkers. Popular media images of the hell-raising, Viking helmet–wearing fraternity lout surely do not capture the full range of alcohol users on our college campuses. But extreme intoxication and its effects are what college administrators, social critics, and parents are most concerned about. In Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You, a recent book about the current college drinking culture, Barrett Seaman provides a graphic list of hazing-related drinking fatalities, tragic deaths caused by alcohol poisoning, and other stories that suggest that excessive university alcohol use has reached dangerous levels with catastrophic consequences for some students and their families.² In a recent attempt to respond to this perceived “culture of dangerous, clandestine binge-drinking” on our nation’s campuses, a group of university presidents circulated a petition known as the Amethyst Initiative. The initiative called for a unified effort to fight the problems generated by college drinking by lowering the drinking age. According to the authors of the initiative, “21 is not working.”³ By 2009, over one hundred college and university presidents had signed the petition, sparking a hostile response from activist groups, like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), who claim that raising the drinking age to twenty-one has saved thousands of lives. According to a MADD press release,

As students head back to school, more than 100 college and university presidents have signed on to a misguided initiative that uses deliberately misleading information to confuse the public on the effectiveness of the 21 law. The initiative is led by another organization with a political agenda of lowering the drinking age in the name of reducing college binge drinking. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) National President Laura Dean-Mooney said, “Underage and binge drinking is a tough problem and we welcome an honest discussion about how to address this challenge but that discussion must honor the science behind the 21 law which unequivocally shows that the 21 law has reduced drunk driving and underage and binge drinking.” MADD, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the American Medical Association (AMA), National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Governors Highway Safety Association and other science, medical and public health organizations, and all members of the Support 21 Coalition call on these college and university presidents to remove their names from this list and urge them to work with the public health community and law enforcement on real solutions to underage and binge drinking.⁴

The Amethyst Initiative’s petition is just one example of countless strategies aimed at curbing the college drinking problem. University prevention and treatment programs have taken the form of brief motivational interventions, cognitive-behavioral skills training, feedback-based interventions, computer-administered alcohol prevention approaches, and programs aimed at college drinkers who have been caught and mandated to undergo alcohol education.⁵ In general, these attempts to reduce problem drinking behaviors have, at best, resulted in small, short-term reductions in alcohol abuse. Other highly touted programs, like “A Matter of Degree” (a systems-based approach focused on the interaction among college students, drinking norms, and alcohol-related access and availability) have been credited with making only modest gains in the battle to reduce college alcohol abuse.⁶ People are getting desperate about college alcohol abuse, and yet no one seems to agree on the solution.

In this highly politicized social context, the current study seeks to raise our understanding about the social circumstances of “getting wasted.” This emphasis on “getting wasted” is not a sensationalist attempt to dramatize the dangers of college drinking, but is, instead, an effort to investigate a phenomenon—frequent and potentially harmful intoxication—that has raised so many concerns. And studies of college drinking do suggest that the current patterns of alcohol abuse are related to trouble. College students who binge drink—defined for men as the consumption of five or more alcoholic drinks in a row at least once in the prior two weeks, and for women as the consumption of four or more drinks in a row at least once in the prior two weeks—are more likely to do poorly in school, miss class, vandalize property, get into fights and get injured, and get sexually victimized than their nonbinging counterparts.⁷ According to college alcohol scholars Henry Wechsler and Bernice Wuethrich,

A large proportion of college students have reported being victimized by intoxicated individuals. Heavy drinkers were themselves more likely to be victimized by a fellow intoxicated student. Similarly, at high-binge schools—which we define as a school where more than 50 percent of the student body binge drinks—86 percent of college administrators said that sexual assault was a problem on their campuses; 61 percent said that physical assaults were a problem; and 53 percent noted a problem with damage to campus property.⁸

The relationship between college drinking and sexual victimization is particularly troubling. Indeed, a large body of research has shown that binge drinking by college students has been associated with an increased risk for rape and sexual victimization, especially for women. For example, Wechsler and Wuethrich found that 23 percent of their survey respondents who attended heavy-drinking universities experienced unwanted sexual advances while at school.⁹ Furthermore, scholars routinely find that women who are sexually victimized at college are more likely to be actively involved in the college drinking scene and consume more alcohol than other women when they go out and that over ninety thousand university students are victims of alcohol-related sexual assault or rape each year.¹⁰

Furthermore, extreme alcohol consumption in college is associated with a variety of other types of catastrophic consequences, including drunk-driving fatalities and other kinds of “drinking-related” deaths.¹¹ Most college drinkers do not drink themselves to death, get sexually victimized, or become seriously injured, but most of them, at some point, get sick, get into fights, and have relational problems that they attribute to being wasted. All these bad things happen and yet, students continue to chase the alcohol high. Why do student drinkers persist in their drunkenness when so many bad outcomes can occur?

Maybe they continue to get ripped because it is fun. This simple observation—that being bad is fun—is often overlooked by scholars of crime and deviance. Jack Katz, a sociologist who studied the “seductions of crime,” argued that scholars have focused the great majority of their efforts on discovering the background factors (e.g., psychological disorders, social disadvantages, family problems) that cause misbehavior and have given little attention to the “positive, often wonderful attractions within the lived experience of criminality.”¹² In other words, being bad (e.g., getting intoxicated) can be its own reward. This is probably true for university drinkers, who view the pleasant parts of collective drunkenness as outweighing the potential for trouble. In fact, young alcohol users often have a simple explanation for their pursuit of intoxication. Getting intoxicated can be “fun,” “relaxing,” and an effective way to relieve stress. The perceived rewards of an alcohol high are well documented in studies of adolescent and young adult drinkers. According to scholars who study alcohol expectancies (i.e., what drinkers expect to experience when drunk), reducing anxiety, becoming more sociable, and fighting shyness are all commonly reported explanations for excessive alcohol use.¹³

Alcohol does, indeed, relax people. The reasons for the relaxing effects of alcohol are not entirely clear, although alcohol scholars have provided some clues. Although the current study aims to illuminate the social dimensions of alcohol intoxication, some attention to the bio-chemical processes at work during alcohol consumption is needed. Alcohol may feel relaxing because it interferes with the brain’s circuitry. The most important bio-chemical effect of alcohol has to do with the way it changes the behavior of neurotransmitters. According to forensic scientists Alan Wayne Jones and Derrick J. Pounder, the mood and behavioral changes experienced when one is under the influence of alcohol can be attributed to the manner in which ethanol interacts with the membrane receptors in the brain linked with the inhibitory neurotransmitters glutamate and gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA). Jones and Pounder suggest that “the behavioral effects of ethanol are dose-dependent and after drinking small amounts the individual relaxes, experiences mild euphoria, and becomes more talkative. … [M]any of the pharmacological effects of ethanol can be explained by an altered flux of ions through the chloride channel activated by the neurotransmitter GABA.”¹⁴ Thus, when alcohol enhances glutamate- and GABA-receptor functioning, it results in feelings of calm and anxiety reduction. Similarly, the increased release of endorphins during alcohol consumption creates a numb, calming sensation. Therefore, the intoxication euphemism “feeling no pain” makes sense in a scientific sense. The enhancement of the process activated by glutamate and GABA in addition to the release of endorphins may actually feel like a general sedative or pain reliever.

There are, however, some powerful social processes that make drinking a relaxing, relatively carefree enterprise. Scholars have referred to the pocket of temporary, carefree irresponsibility provided by a night of drinking as a “time out.”¹⁵ The “time out” image suggests that the drinker receives a brief respite from the everyday work and family stresses that we all grapple with most of the time. But many college drinkers seem to be looking for a bit more than a “time out.” Collective drinking is an adventure. A night of drinking can become a matrix of unpredictable events. And the ways in which codrinkers respond to those events provide the groundwork for future “war stories.” Most people who attended college have their own cache of war stories that they dust off whenever they get together with old friends. Even the particularly troubling Shit Shows can seem funny and exciting many years later. To say that drinking with friends is fun, then, does not quite do justice to the constellation of rewards that college alcohol users experience. Past research has largely treated as unproblematic the idea that alcohol use is fun and relaxing. A closer examination into what exactly is fun about drinking—especially since so much can and does go wrong—is needed. We can all agree that partying with one’s friends can be pleasurable; still, the negative aspects of alcoholic intoxication must be navigated by young drinkers if they are to continue drinking. To aid in understanding this navigating the negative idea it is useful to refer to the work of the noted American sociologist Howard Becker.

Over forty years ago, Becker studied the social practices of marijuana smokers.¹⁶ Becker was no stuffy intellectual. He was a sociologist, deviance scholar, and a professional dance musician in the Chicago club scene. Jamming with career musicians on a regular basis gave Becker good access to weed smokers. His interviews with them—and with laborers, machinists, and other users—allowed him to create a three-step model describing the process through which new marijuana users learned to use and enjoy the drug. According to the theory, rookie users had to successfully pass through three steps before they would become frequent pot smokers: first, they had to “learn the technique”; second, they needed to “learn to perceive the effects”; and third, they had to “learn to enjoy the effects.” Becker’s idea was that becoming a frequent smoker was a social process involving the learning of traditions and rituals and the redefinition of physiological effects so that inexperienced users would learn how to smoke properly to trigger the high (e.g., draw the smoke in deeply and hold it) and would learn to identify and truly appreciate the marijuana intoxication. One of Becker’s more provocative arguments was that inexperienced users would not continue to use marijuana if they did not learn to reframe some of the unpleasant aspects of the marijuana high in favorable ways:

Marihuana-produced sensations are not automatically or necessarily pleasurable. The taste for such experience is a socially acquired one, not different in kind from acquired tastes for oysters or dry martinis. The user feels dizzy, thirsty; his scalp tingles; he misjudges time and distances. Are these things pleasurable? He isn’t sure. If he is to continue marihuana use, he must decide that they are. Otherwise, getting high, while a real enough experience, will be an unpleasant one he would rather avoid.¹⁷

Perhaps Becker overstated the negative effects of the marijuana high. Again, most marijuana users will tell you that getting stoned is fun. It feels good. It enhances music, it accentuates one’s sense of taste, it warps one’s sense of humor in pleasant ways (some people actually enjoy uncontrollable laughter). But Becker’s central point—that getting high and learning to enjoy intoxication is a social process—is a powerful insight. This insight may serve as one lens through which to see the process of getting wasted. Just like unseasoned pot smokers, inexperienced drinkers may learn how to drink, how to define and appreciate intoxication, and how to evaluate their own drunken performances with the help of co-conspirators (i.e., other drunks). This is a highly sociological way of thinking about drinking. Instead of seeing intoxication as just an individual experience, we must see college drinking as a collective, social process. Getting wasted, “buzzed,” or somewhere in between is a collaborative effort.

Thus, the current study is a sociological ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 This Is the Shit Show! An Introduction to College Drinking
• 2 Getting Wasted: The Intoxication Process
• 3 Being Wasted: Fun, Adventure, and Transformation in the World of College Drinking
• 4 When Everything Falls Apart: Meeting the Challenges of the College Drinking Scene
• 5 The Morning After: Hangovers and Regrets
• 6 Using Drunk Support: Responding to the Persistence of Heavy Drinking
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author