David Hoppe

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:: Getting bent

The Amethyst Initiative

By David Hoppe

Wrecked, loaded, blind. Smashed and trashed. Blotto. The glossary of drunkenness amounts to a verbal bender as old as language itself. It seems safe to say that as soon as we discovered speech, we started slurring it via the grain and the grape. And since we happen to be an animal with a penchant for naming, it follows that we would accumulate a wealth of terms to describe the effects of our over-indulgence.

Like, for instance, shit-faced.

It appears that college students have been getting this way at an alarming rate. So much so that over 120 college and university presidents have signed on to the Amethyst Initiative, a document intended to get people to rethink society's approach to drinking. The academics have seen a marked increase in binge drinking by their students, in spite of the fact that the drinking age is 21. This has led many of the academics to the seemingly counter-intuitive suggestion to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18.

In making people wait for a legal drink until they turn 21, the US imposes one of the strictest age requirements in the western world. This, argue the academics, encourages young adults who can otherwise vote, drive and serve in the military, to consider binge drinking a kind of forbidden fruit or rite of passage that includes bonus points for breaking the law. By lowering the drinking age, the signers of the Amethyst Initiative suggest that drinking might be demystified and better integrated into everyday life.

This idea has at least a couple of things going for it. In the first place, it's reality-based. Laws that cannot be enforced amount to little more than wishful thinking on the part of the bluenoses who think they know what's best for the rest of us. Not only are such laws irrelevant in terms of peoples' real life experience, they instill an abiding lack of respect for the institutions that obstinately insist on trying to enforce them, turning citizens into victims for doing what comes naturally. The same thing, of course, applies to laws prohibiting the use of such psychotropic substances as marijuana and psilocybin.

In its desire to lighten the heavy hand of prohibition, the Amethyst Initiative appears to borrow from the Dutch maxim to "do no harm." This approach sees the demonization of certain age-old human appetites - for intoxication and sex - as counterproductive. The idea is not to try and create a bureaucrat's idea of the perfect human animal, but to let that animal be itself so long as harm is not done to others. According to this model, the only thing demonization gets you is a police state.

While the authors of the Amethyst Initiative are right to be concerned about their students' binge drinking, there are some things they have overlooked. Binge drinking is also a problem in countries with what might politely be called "traditional" drinking cultures. In the UK , where an 18 year-old can saunter into a pub for a pint, authorities are proposing to raise the drinking age due to a surge in emergency room visits brought on by alcohol abuse. In Scotland , kids are getting blind by dropping booze directly into their eyes - they find the hit goes more quickly to the brain that way.

But all this about when or how we get plastered only begs the question of what it is about our culture makes us so self-destructive. In this, the academics may inadvertently be complicit. They should ask themselves why so many young adults, rather than embracing adulthood, seem hell-bent on trying to prolong their adolescence as long as possible. They should consider the ways their institutions abet this condition - from treating students like retail shoppers who are always right, to looking the other way at the length of time it takes many students to graduate from what is supposed to be a four-year program. They should think about the pressures implicit in the high cost of tuition versus the diminishing value of many degrees in the marketplace.

And they should insist that we reconsider our obsession with the idea of the marketplace itself. Ours is a society that insists on the virtues of competition, but that tilts the playing field in favor of those with connections and clout. Life may be unfair, but when society rubs peoples' faces in that fact, it's no wonder so many of us decide to get bent.