‘We’re trying to educate students about more, unique ways of having a good time. People are partying but not having the big beer blasts they used to have.’ : Knowing When to Say No Is Not Easy

For Judy Mahanna, the problem with booze started in college.

During her undergraduate years at Smith College, drinking was a way of life. Later at the University of Michigan, hard drinking--a fifth of bourbon a night, shared with a lover--accompanied the high-stress world of graduate school.

By the time she had earned her degree, Mahanna was a “master” at more than just social work. She was one hell of a drinker.

“I didn’t think that was strange at all,” she said. “Then I started getting increasingly unhappy and didn’t know why.”

Mahanna moved to San Diego after her marriage broke up. Later, she was hospitalized for alcoholism. Now she heads the drug and alcohol rehabilitation program at Vista Hill Hospital in Chula Vista, where she was admitted on “a long night” in 1978.

Mahanna says she owes it all to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and a group called SPAN, which gave her the education and the confidence to warn others of the dangers of booze. SPAN started in 1977 as a “human services certificate program,” a non-degree training program at San Diego State University. SPAN students are, for the most part, in their 30s and 40s and are studying to become counselors, therapists and experts in drug and alcohol rehabilitation.

They’re all experts in the sense of having traveled the low road to misery and pain. Many, in college before, simply drank themselves out of degrees. Undergraduate years, normally a time of romance and fun, are a distant blur. Being back in college is “a little bit scary,” said Lana Ante, a SPAN graduate. Fellow students are younger, and don’t yet bear the burden of lost innocence. But SPAN students may have an edge. They are, Ante said, motivated by the “taint of experience.”

The taint of experience would seem a likely focal point of National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week, being observed this week on area campuses. The focus of the week isn’t, as it would seem to be, alcoholism. The week is sponsored by the Beer Wholesalers of San Diego, which one spokesman says is most concerned with “responsible drinking.”

Others, such as Ante and Fran Lambert, the founder of SPAN, are critical of such a sponsor while praising such a week.

“Awareness about the evils of drink is a good thing,” said Ante, 37, whose habit finally locked her in a prison cell. “But responsible drinking to an alcoholic means, I’m afraid, no drinking at all.”

Judy Mahanna refused comment on the sponsorship by Beer Wholesalers. She echoed others, however, in saying that such a move is part of a trend--formula companies promoting breast feeding, casinos funding efforts to avert compulsive gambling. She speaks from experience in saying college students are no match for the dangers of drink.

“That’s when the disease starts to strike,” she said. “It sneaks up at times. And you thought you were just having fun? Most college students don’t even know there’s a problem. Why? Because the atmosphere is so permissive. They’re not discouraged to stop drinking. They’re encouraged to start, or at least to keep going. It’s tied to the whole sense of fun and experience in the college years.”

Megan Delane is an 18-year-old sophomore from Palos Verdes, a student at the University of San Diego. She is neither an alcoholic nor a drinker. She, like many students these days, has had several friends killed by drunk drivers.

“I don’t drink,” she said slowly, in carefully measured tones. “The social life is so big here. (Fraternity and sorority) life, too. Drinking is a major part of that. I had one friend who was riding his motorcycle and got hit by a drunk driver. Drugs are not as serious a problem, unless I’m completely cut off. . . . But alcohol is , one that doesn’t go away, it just gets worse. When you know a couple, as I did, who were killed by a drunk driver, robbed of life in their early 20s, you start to think about this. It is really, really bad.”

Not Spreading Fear

Tim Purpura is one of the first people to credit the contribution of SPAN. But Purpura, assistant residential dean at Revelle College, UC San Diego, said the purpose of Alcohol Awareness Week is hardly to spread fear.

“We’re trying to educate students about more, unique ways of having a good time,” he said. “And, I think it’s working. People are partying but not having the big beer blasts they used to have.”

Each of the three major campuses has brought in a series of guest speakers, the most prominent being Robert Anastas, who founded Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD). Anastas has spoken about SADD’s Contract for Life program, in which students write out a contract with a friend. The two-way commitment makes each person promise that if one is drunk and needs a ride home, the other will drive. (Assuming, of course, that the other person is sober.)

Each campus has its own activities, and some are coordinated among all three. Much of the week involves question-and-answer sessions with experts, as well as music, a crafts fair and skits. The common link is alcohol.

Mahanna and others say the trend toward “sensible drinking” is good, if only that it differs so dramatically from the early 1970s, when states moved strongly toward an 18-year-old drinking age--a response, she thinks, to guilt over Vietnam. Now, the pendulum has swung back. Lower-alcohol and no-alcohol beers are increasingly in vogue, stop-drunk-driving is a national crusade, and bumper stickers have never been more in evidence. But, she said, they don’t tackle the problem of what to do with the alcoholic, whether he’s at IBM or SDSU.

Are there alcoholics on campus?

“Oh, yes,” Purpura said. “Students who are alcoholic tend to rise to the surface rather easily these days. They’re easier to determine and refer to counseling. Maybe because there’s this awareness about drinking, there’s more of a notion to examine the chronic class-skipper, the otherwise brilliant student making poor grades. If, in a university setting, you’re unable to perform, it comes to light pretty quickly. Especially, at a campus like this (with 10,000 undergraduates). Nowadays, there are 9- and 10-year-old alcoholics. And there are still the guys who put their hands through windows.”

And the guy who, on a Friday night, was found by Purpura sitting alone in his room with his wrist slit open by a broken vodka bottle drained dry. Even in spite of him, Purpura believes that drinking has a place on campus, that the Beer Wholesalers have every right to sponsor such a week.

“Drinking is still an important part of college,” he said. “It’s still fun for a hell of a lot of people--as it should be. Some beer companies are doing a lot to educate students about drinking and driving.”

Mahanna and others say that’s wonderful, but no degree of “responsible drinking” will make a difference--for some people. Only sobriety will. Her road was painful and self-destructive. Along the way were friendships that didn’t work, marriages that fared worse and too many good moments she can’t remember.

That’s where SPAN fits in and can patch up life by offering a dream, she said. Her dream was getting sober and starting a treatment center for female alcoholics. She was able to do that through a program that gives a student a year’s worth of undergraduate work (en route to becoming a social worker or alcoholism counselor) while also providing field experience.

There she came in contact with problem drinkers making their own initial attempts at overcoming alcoholism. It isn’t unusual in the SPAN lexicon, she said, to find students who themselves were counseled by SPAN graduates. “A healing chain,” she called it, one in jeopardy due to funding cuts.

SPAN was funded for about one year by the County of San Diego. Ordinarily, a group like SPAN would be easy to fund, but, she said, it isn’t easy to categorize or define. SPAN needs funding, she said, so that students won’t have to pay their own way.

Funding sources ask first, “Is it prevention oriented?” Not really, Lambert said. “Is it medically or clinically oriented?” another might wonder. No, she’ll say. Operation Cork, Joan Kroc’s alcohol education agency, said no to SPAN’s funding request because it didn’t promise “a national focus.”

“I guess we just weren’t big enough,” Lambert said.

SPAN is local, rooted entirely in San Diego. It is not medically, clinically or prevention oriented, except that it gives past users and abusers a chance at a new career, a way of sharing their own pain while helping others overcome theirs.

“I guess that isn’t sexy enough,” she said.

But it has turned out 75 graduates in seven years and gets high marks from just about everybody. It exists under the rubric of Episcopal Community Services, which gives it a storefront, a couple of desks and a telephone but hasn’t the money to grant funding. SPAN exists at the moment with students paying their own tuition and expenses at SDSU.

Glenn Allison, executive director of Episcopal Community Services, said he has been amazed at commencement exercises in which scores of SPAN graduates gather round with families.

“That’s an incredible sight,” he said, “knowing that a group like this can reunite families. Curing an alcoholic is no easy task, but SPAN, and its opportunities, go a long way.”

Lana Ante agrees. She also worries that having a beer group sponsor Alcohol Awareness Week won’t do enough to stop what she sees as a troubling trend.

“The combination of drugs and alcohol is what’s hurting, or in some cases killing, students these days,” she said. “Kids are reaching their bottoms faster. The combining of deadly drugs is getting worse and worse. Maybe my own experience makes me skeptical, but having a beer group show them the way just doesn’t make much sense.”

Who’s to say? Purpura asked. When it comes to drinking, there are no easy answers.

“But,” he said, “isn’t that the main reason for having an awareness week in the first place?”