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Delta Zeta Questions Campus Alcohol Customs
by Caitlin Daly
Parties on college campuses are not uncommon, even at Mars Hill College. Beer pong, a drinking game involving cups and ping pong balls, is found almost always at any college party.
To play the game, two teams of two stand on either side of a table. On each end of the table, you put six cups filled 1/3 of the way with beer and set them in a triangle. Standing at one end of the table, you try to make ping pong balls bounce into the cups on the other side. If you do get a ball into a cup, one of your competitors has to drink that cup. The object of the game is to make all the cups before the other team.
Delta Zeta took this common drinking game and put a twist on it. Instead of beer, use root beer. During dinner in Pittman Dining Hall, the sisters set up two tables and filled the cups with root beer. They also projected an educational film on binge drinking.
"People think it's the alcohol that makes the good time," says Delta Zeta President Lauren Dogariu. "They're wrong! The alcohol is just the draw. It's everyone getting together and hanging out that's fun. People don't realize we don't need the beer, wine, and liquor---we just need to find a way to get everyone together without using alcohol as an incentive."
According to TeensHealth website, binge drinking "is the consumption of five or more drinks in a row by men - or four or more drinks in a row by women - at least once in the previous two weeks. Heavy binge drinking includes three or more such episodes in two weeks."
Binge drinking has directly affected the Mars Hill campus. Not only do students get drinking tickets from campus security, but many end up in jail, or worse --in the hospital. Sledding accidents, car accidents---minor to major, and just downright ridiculous events have been the result of people drinking entirely too much for their body to handle.
This problem with alcohol is not unique to Mars Hill's campus. Schools around the country struggle with how to keep students' drinking from getting out of control. And now, after the recent votes that brought beer and wine into Mars Hill and Marshall, it has become that much easier for students to bring alcohol on campus.
Craig Goforth, dean of students, has been at Mars Hill College since 1990 and has come across many incidents involving alcohol. Goforth is firmly against drinking himself but knows that people always are going to drink.
"They tried to make drinking illegal," Goforth said, "and that's called the 18th Amendment." He sees a direct relationship between alcohol and campus crime, date rape , and poor academic performance.
When Goforth was a police officer in Mars Hill, he came across a man who had drunk entirely too much. He was standing on the edge of the fountain in the quad, and was reaching for the sky. When Goforth asked the man what he was doing, the man replied, "I'm trying to get closer to Jesus."
Goforth remembers a specific incident in which a student went to an off campus party and consumed a huge amount of alcohol. The student slept for four or five hours, then tried to drive home. The student was pulled over and went to jail for driving under the influence. The student had a blood alcohol level of .11; the legal limit is .08.
Drinking was the direct cause of a sledding accident that landed the person in question in the hospital. Another intoxicated student, thinking it was his dormitory, tried relentlessly to get into another building on campus.
Last year, a student got so intoxicated that in simply trying to pull into a parking space, he managed to damage not only his own car, but five others.
Goforth explained that alcohol is especially dangerous for females. "There isn't a softer target for a male than a drunk female," Goforth said. "The drunker, the better. The biggest date rape drug isn't rohypnol or GHB, it's alcohol."
As a graduate student, Goforth wrote a paper about alcohol use by college students. In it, he quotes studies that show that an estimated 90 percent of all campus rapes are done when alcohol has been consumed by either the suspect or victim.
Other studies show that an estimated 95 percent of violent crime committed on campus is alcohol-related and that 80 percent of all vandalism on campus is committed by students consuming alcohol.
He also found studies showing that the amount of money students spend on alcohol in a year is more than students spend on coffee, milk, juice, soft drinks, tea, and their books all together.
A group of business students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo began a Responsible Drinking Program, and set up a website of their findings. According to their website, alcohol increases estrogen levels, so women taking birth control or other medications with estrogen will have an increased intoxication. Also, from the first day of school until the Thanksgiving break, freshman females are at the highest risk for being sexually assaulted.
In 2004, it was reported that 46.9% of incoming freshman at Mars Hill had participated in binge drinking. The same freshmen were surveyed again at the end of fall semester and this number went up to 48.7%.
Goforth believes that you need some kind of draw while educating people on alcohol. To get people's attention while educating them about alcohol, he says, you must "make education relevant."
Some students criticized Delta Zeta about hosting the root beer pong tournament. They claimed it was hypocritical. "But if the students had actually listened, they would have seen what Delta Zeta was trying to do," said Dogariu.
"When we did the root beer pong tournament, we weren't saying 'don't drink', we were just trying to show people how dangerous things can be," Dogariu explains. "I wish that people would just stop and think about what they are doing. Maybe, if they took a step back and just looked, they would see how their actions affect themselves, people's perception of them, and everyone around them."
Hilltop Reporter Caitlin Daly is a member of Delta Zeta sorority.
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