Drinking Deaths Cast Pall on Campuses

As sure as the appearance of Polartec jackets, it is a yearly rite of fall. College students knuckle down to study, and, just as predictably, many loosen up at serious parties filled with heavy, heavy drinking. On most campuses, the phrase “let’s party” is code for “let’s get smashed.”

But three alcohol-related deaths in a week in Massachusetts are prompting government and college officials around the country to take a fresh, hard look at underage binge drinking. Authorities say the deaths last week of an 18-year-old freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a high school student in Andover and a University of Massachusetts undergraduate who fell through the roof of a greenhouse while apparently drunk will have repercussions at campuses nationwide.

“Of course it reverberates,” said Robert J. Naples, dean of students and assistant vice chancellor at UCLA. “You think, ‘There but for the grace of God go we.’ Maybe it was MIT. But it could have been UCLA. It has been UCLA.”

All three cases here remain under investigation, but authorities said none appear to involve hazing or initiation rituals. Rather, the students simply drank too much. Tests showed that Scott Krueger of Orchard Park, N.Y., who fell into a coma at MIT’s Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house and was removed from life supports three days later, had a blood alcohol level of 0.410, the equivalent of gulping 20 shots of liquor in one hour. Krueger collapsed after drinking a mixture of beer and rum at a party to celebrate the pairing off of pledges and their “big brother” upperclassmen.

The high school student, a 17-year-old senior, attended a weekend party where copious drinking occurred. Her friends left her passed out, thinking she was asleep. In fact, she was in an alcohol-induced coma from which she never recovered.

At the University of Massachusetts, a student’s fall from a building in the middle of the night was first thought to be an accident. But a post-mortem showed he was drunk when he fell.

The three Massachusetts deaths followed only by weeks the alcohol-poisoning death of a 20-year-old fraternity pledge at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Social psychologist Henry Wechsler, the country’s leading expert on campus binge drinking, said the spate of fatal alcohol episodes is proof of the prevalence of binge drinking among college and high school students.

“It shows it’s everywhere,” said Wechsler, principal investigator on the college alcohol studies task force of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Wild weekends of excessive alcohol consumption are nothing new on campus. Keg parties are at least as old as the keg. Drinking societies at Yale and Princeton date back almost to the founding of those universities, and students at Dartmouth for many years referred to the New Hampshire town where the school is located as Hangover, not Hanover. At some schools in the Northeast, student volunteers roam campuses on wintry nights to make sure that students who have passed out from drinking do not freeze to death.

But it wasn’t until 1994, when Wechsler published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., that the phrase “binge drinking” was attached to the student ritual of recurrent intoxication.

Wechsler, who is updating his study, defined binge drinking as five or more sequential drinks for men, and four or more for women. (The difference relates to metabolism, Wechsler said, not weight.) His national survey found that 44% of college students were binge drinkers. But at fraternity houses, the figure soared to 86%.

More recently, a 1995 study by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health showed the phenomenon to be almost as widespread among high school students. Using Wechsler’s standards, 38.7% of male high school students in the state were found to be binge drinkers, and 28% of girls fell into the same category.

Nationally, Wechsler said, the number of adult drinkers has declined, “but the number of binge drinkers in college has stayed really strongly the same.”

Young people “think it’s all right to drink enough to get drunk when they are with friends,” he said. “There’s a very clear distinction between drinking and binge drinking, which involves a group--getting smashed for the purpose of getting smashed, together.”

Alcohol is so entrenched in the fabric of student life that administrators despair of breaking its grip.

“The reality is, I don’t know if we’re ever going to stop it,” said Naples, of UCLA. “Campuses can work on the nationals of fraternities to ban alcohol. I don’t think that will stop someone who wants to drink from drinking.”

At a press conference late in the week, MIT President Charles M. Vest said the school will launch a review of its alcohol and housing policies. MIT has also suspended the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, where Krueger’s fatal party took place. Vest denied that the school has failed to respond to earlier complaints of excessive drinking at fraternities. But he added, “I will be the first to admit that the lesson of this tragedy is that we’ve been inadequate.”

Government officials in Massachusetts, however, vowed to react swiftly to the trio of alcohol-related deaths in their state. Acting Gov. Paul Cellucci, a Republican, announced Thursday that he is launching a series of radio ads aimed at combating underage drinking. On the same day, Atty. Gen. Scott Harshbarger, who is Cellucci’s leading Democratic opponent in the already competitive 1998 gubernatorial race, filed bills to toughen penalties for violations involving underage drinking. Among other measures, Harshbarger’s legislation targets the use and manufacture of fake identification cards, another age-old practice among young drinkers.

Boston City Council members also joined in the response. While MIT, where Krueger was enrolled, is across the Charles River in Cambridge, the school’s fraternity houses are in Boston’s Fenway district. Councilors said they would look into stiffening penalties for liquor stores that deliver directly to fraternity houses.