Eliza Letteney
To be clear, I don’t want to restrict any- one’s bodily autonomy and I don’t expect college students to stop drinking. What I do want is for us, as a student body to reevaluate the way we think about student safety when it comes to our drug of choice: alcohol.
Consider the security briefs that you see in this newspaper each week. We rarely go one week without a few entries under the “ALCO- HOL” header. The little blurbs read “drank too much, sent to Wellness” or “drank too much, sent to ER.” For a while, I’d skim over those and focus on more exciting incidents like theft or vandalism. Still, ever since my first week here, I’ve felt a little funny looking at those security briefs. I see each one as a story and I struggle when picturing those limp, vomit-soaked bodies carried to Wellness each week by friends or strangers. I felt even stranger when I realized how few people felt as I did.
I can’t ignore the fact that this is personal for me. In 2016, my father died of organ failure related to his alcoholism. I know what it is to lose someone to the most extreme version of drinking, so while I’m aware that not all college students are like that and not all drinking is self-destruction, I can’t help but feel that we as a campus, are not aware of the actual severity of the situation sanitized by the phrase, “drank too much, sent to Wellness.”
When it comes to alcohol, many of us do not want to admit a few simple, verifiable truths. If a student took too much of any other drug and was “sent to Wellness,” I can promise that the incident report would look a lot more like “student hospitalized for [insert drug type] overdose.” I would argue that this is the phrasing we should adopt. After all, alcohol is categorically a drug. Getting “sent to Wellness” or the ER is hospitalization. When someone ends up hospitalized for ingesting too much alcohol, that fits the literal definition of a drug overdose. This particular type of drug over- dose is called alcohol poisoning and can be quite life threatening.
When you look at it that way, then it’s easier to see the issue in having so many “drank too much, sent to Wellness” reports each week. To me, our complacency about the issue is just as disturbing as the issue itself. I won’t pretend to understand the nuances of each and every social situation where someone overdoses on alcohol, but I think it shouldn’t be a controversial statement to say that it’s buck- wild that this is so normal for us.
I’m not sure if anyone on campus is talking about this, but if they are, they clearly aren’t loud enough. I’m willing to annoy every student on this campus if it means I can go one week with- out being reminded that the same overdose that wrecked my family is a totally normal and accepted occurrence. All I ask is that you think about this, even if it feels uncomfortable. I know I think about it every day.