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NIAAA Addresses College Binge-Drinking Problemby LaTonya Wesley, Public Policy Office The National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse (NIAAA) Subcommittee on College Drinking, established in 1998, convened in Washington DC this September to discuss alcohol abuse as a public health problem on college campuses across the nation. In their final meeting of the year, a panel of college presidents, researchers, and service-providers met to address the problem of binge-drinking in college student populations. Primary concerns of the college presidents included the need for widespread education about the seriousness of the problem, suggestions for gathering and analyzing data on binge-drinking, and policy dilemmas regarding prevention and treatment both on- and off-campus. Given the limited jurisdiction of even the most intensive campus programming, college officials were particularly interested in discussing the issue within a community context. "The overall purpose of the subcommittee is to bring research to the table," said NIAAA Executive Officer Stephen Long. "Too many colleges implement programs without a solid research base and without evaluation. The only way that we will achieve long-term improvements is through comprehensive science-based programs." As the primary federal funding source for behavioral research related to alcohol, NIAAA is the obvious home for efforts to grow community interventions from earlier basic research. Henry Wechsler, PhD, an NIAAA subcommittee member in the Department of Health and Social Medicine at Harvard?s School of Public Health, first started collecting national data on college students and drinking in the early 1990s. Other researchers added that frequent college binge-drinkers often overestimate the social norm for drinking on their campuses, and that students' perceptions of whether their schools had a drinking problem were related to their own drinking levels. Existing research has found that unintentional injury (including motor vehicle crashes, falls, drownings, burns, and unintended gunshot wounds) claimed over 94,000 lives in 1998 and is the leading cause of death for people aged 16-34. Approximately one-third of unintentional injuries are estimated to be alcohol related. Some college programs have attempted to challenge existing social norms regarding drinking in an effort to reduce excessive alcohol use. For example: the University of California at Los Angeles mandates that all pledges of fraternities and sororities attend annual workshops on acquaintance rape and its relation to drinking. At Eastern Michigan University, their program called "Checkpoint" consists of three 2-hour sessions to address the effects of alcohol and goal setting to decrease the risk. Student offenders must pay a $75 fee ($25 to the school and $50 for a court fee) and are required to complete all three workshops. Florida State University has created a Partnership for Alcohol Responsibility (PAR) on their campus. PAR has successfully initiated a letter writing campaign to local bars urging them to change advertising strategies that violated the campus's alcohol policies. The subcommittee concluded its meeting with a list of recommended strategies that focus on advising NIAAA about additional research initiatives, improving campus prevention and treatment programs, and educating college presidents and researchers with reliable information on the overall quality and effectiveness of current initiatives. The subcommittee hopes to have its final report completed by the end of the year and plans to submit it to the advisory council at the February 2001 meeting. Public Policy Office 750
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