Don't Drink and...that's it...just don't drink

The University of Oklahoma has banned drinking in residence halls and fraternities after a student died from alcohol poisoning. Here's the quote from the Yahoo story:

University President David L. Boren called underage drinking a "national epidemic" and handed down a strict alcohol policy.

In a 15-point plan announced Dec. 1 and approved five days later by the university's Board of Regents, Boren banned alcohol in residence halls and fraternity houses. Some campus-affiliated organizations will be allowed to serve drinks, but only on weekends.

This is totally not going to work. The article goes on to quote community leaders who agree with me, but I can make the case as well as any of them. Kids of collegiate age want to get drunk. I did when I was that age. It's a combination of curiosity and availability. Most kids begin to experiment with alcohol (and drugs, particularly weed) in high school, so by the time they get to college, it's less the curiostiy and more the availability. Limit one, and watch the other go up.

Seriously, the more strongly you forbid alcohol, the more kids want to drink it. Not that they wouldn't already, but I've found that in environments where alcohol is readily available, people soon learn to moderate their drinking, except alcoholics or those with alcoholic tendences. And those people are going to either deal with their problem or not, regardless of school policy.

These sort of laws come from a very simple, basic impulse. Kids are drinking too much? Make sure they can't get booze! But it just doesn't work. Better to advise kids against excessive drinking, punish places that serve alcohol to minors or serve alcohol without a license, and hope for the best.

When I was a senior at UCLA, the people who lived in the Westwood community pressured the college to forbid a practice called the Midnight Yell, when students relieve the stress of studying for finals by screaming out the windows and in the streets at midnight. It was a silly little ritual, but students had been doing it for years, and felt somewhat protective of it, I suppose. So, when it was forbidden, students overreacted, pouring into the streets to yell (and occasionally light a sofa on fire).

Unfortunately, instead of letting this extremely minor uprising go without reaction, the Westwood police responded the next night by showing up in droves, clad in riot gear, arresting anyone out on the streets who seemed suspect. And what do you suppose the reaction was? Full-on rioting for an entire week. I knew students who were arrested, I saw furniture lit on fire and tossed from balconies. I witnessed chaos of a controlled but unsettling nature. And all because the response to perceived misbehavior was overly extreme.

And that's what will happen at the University of Oklahoma. Call it needlessly rebellious, call it junveile, but college kids want to drink, feel it is their right as college students to drink, and are going to drink no matter what you lame adults have to say about it. The more you force it underground, the worse it's going to get.