University of Wisconsin Madison has such a bad reputation for alcohol I’m surprised parents are still sending their kids there. They are on the top ten party schools list year after year and probably graduate hundreds of budding or full-fledged alcoholics every year. I’m sure many of the students will eventually need alcohol rehab – whether they admit it or not. But administrators at the school are seriously trying to change the school’s image, and that means stricter rules about drinking.

In fact, the problem isn’t only with Wisconsin universities – the entire state is known as a drinking culture. A few years ago Wisconsin was # 1 in the U.S. for binge drinking, percentage of drinkers in the population, and driving under the influence.

Here’s a quote from an article written a few years ago.

“We lag a few states in beer consumption, but we’re near the top. With brandy, it’s no contest. We put away more brandy per person than any other state. We have a strong claim on the vodka title, too. And often we have no clue how drunk we are. Consider, for example, 75 drinkers who took a breath test for the Journal Sentinel. About half underestimated their blood-alcohol level, and when they did, they missed by a lot – falling short of their actual results by an average of 35%. Many who were over the legal limit for driving expressed full confidence in their ability to get behind the wheel. Person for person, we have three times more taverns here than the rest of the country.”

It isn’t surprising that schools would also be a big problem.

At University of Wisconsin Madison, students receive citations for underage drinking, requiring a trip to detox, alcohol-related disorderly conduct, or other alcohol violation. They may be referred to counseling and they may be kicked out of dorms; but the penalties and the way the issue was addressed were inconsistent.

Now, a first offense for underage drinking carries a fine of $263.50 – quite a lot for many students – and they are required to do a course on alcohol abuse. The course costs $78 for two group sessions or $200 for private sessions.

A course on alcohol abuse can be effective, although one study found that students who did a similar course when they first entered university as freshman didn’t drink a lot in the first semester but the resolve didn’t last.

Not surprising – considering the environment.

The best option would be a real alcohol and drug rehab program. Finding out about alcohol abuse is helpful, but it doesn’t necessarily help the student get to the bottom of why he’s drinking in the first place, help curb the urge, or enable him to confidently say no in the future – all of which would happen in a really good alcohol addiction treatment program.

Administrators will be watching over things to monitor the success of their new program. But parents are still primarily responsible for making sure their kids are educated on the subject and, if needed, getting them into an alcohol rehab program to get sorted out.

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Finally, the problem of alcohol abuse, drug abuse and addiction in colleges has become the focus of White House Drug Control strategy. I don’t know if it will work – the War on Drugs hasn’t been any big success – but at least it will probably make parents and college kids aware of the problem. And it will lead to more college kids getting into and alcohol or drug rehab program.

Did you know, for example, that …

• More than one in five kids who drop out of college do so because of something related to alcohol?

• Each year there are nearly 2,000 college students die from alcohol-related incidents?

• Over 600,000 college students are unintentionally injured due to alcohol?

• One in four people aged 18 through 34 binge drink – five drinks or more in one sitting?

• Alcohol is involved in 90% of college rapes?

• 70% of college kids say they had unplanned sex because of alcohol and that 20% did not use protection?

• 22.9% of college students meet the medical definition for alcohol or drug abuse or dependence. The rest of the population averages 8.5%.

• That the number of kids using prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet non-medically is rising dramatically?

• That more than 20% of college kids use Adderall as a study drug or to party?

• That 90% of the students who use Adderall also binge drink and are heavy drinkers?

• That full-time college students who use Adderall are 3 times more likely to use marijuana, 8 times more likely to use cocaine, 8 times more likely to use tranquilizers, and 5 times more likely to use pain relievers?

This is pretty serious stuff – and not at all what parents had in mind when they sent their kids off to college with the money the family had been saving for years.

These kids aren’t just having a good time – they are doing things that are very dangerous.

If you have a son or daughter that’s drinking or taking drugs, don’t take it lightly. It’s easy to think that something bad won’t happen to your kid, or that your kid’s drinking or drug taking won’t get worse – some parents even think that going to college will straighten them out. But, statistically, that’s just not true. Get them through a drug rehab program – they also address alcohol – before they go to college. A good program will help them resist the temptation when college comes around.

And, remember, 25% of college students say that drinking alcohol has adversely affected their performance as a student. Don’t be afraid to take your college kid out of college for a while to sort them out. They have far more chance of getting the education and having the future both they and you envisioned.

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I hate to say anything bad about football – it’s an American institution, and a good percentage of our population would give up food before football.  And it’s true that if you wanted your kids to stay away from drugs and alcohol and lead a productive life,  you would get them involved in sports as an extra-curricular activity – all in all, a good thing.  But more and more, football is turning into a drinking sport instead of a healthy team activity. And many guys involved in football wind up in drug or alcohol rehab. Just read the news, you’ll see it every day.

Drinking after the game, and between games, going to parties, being a football star, getting into a college that’s better known for its football team and tail-gating parties than for its education seems to be as much as part of the game of football as the physical activity.

And many of the young football players in high school and college no longer look like the fit Adonises of yesteryear who take pride in their physical condition – they’re overweight and blubbery. I don’t know how some of them make it through a game without having a heart attack.

If your kid is going to play football, make sure you educate him about the sport – what it used to be – the pride of being a fit athlete and good team member – and encourage him to be that kind of football player, someone who takes the game and their physical condition seriously.

And let him know he can still get the chicks if he doesn’t drink. In fact, most girls would prefer a guy who isn’t binge drinking and then falling down drunk , who doesn’t smell like alcohol, who doesn’t feel he has to drink to prove himself or be one of the guys, and who doesn’t associate celebrating with booze. That’s admirable. Pouring pitchers of beer over someone’s head, vomiting, passing out, driving while drunk and risking your life, and that of your friends and innocent other drivers and pedestrians, or having to get someone else to drive you somewhere, is not. What kind of man is that?

Ask any girl – she’ll tell you that kind of stuff is not very attractive. Even if the guy is a ‘football star’.

In fact, if you want to keep your football player son away from alcohol, that argument may meet with more acceptance than any other.

If you can prevent your kids from drinking and they play the game well and take pride in themselves as an athlete, you’ve may have a winning combination. And your kid could have a much longer, more productive career that is not interrupted, or ended, by having to go to rehab.

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A recent article discussed the rise in the number of alcohol-related deaths in college-age kids. They increased by about 25% over a 7 year period. About 30 percent were actually in college. When we were our kids’ age, our parents didn’t have to worry so much about these things when we were going off to college. They didn’t think needing alcohol rehab would be an outcome of higher education.

Sure, they worried – about our grades, about the pressure, about how we’d do our first time away from home, and so on – but not about whether we were going to die from binge drinking, driving while drunk or being in a car with someone who was drunk, or having some other kind of accident that would never have happened had we not been drunk.

Personally, if my kid was already drinking before going to college, I’d send them to a good alcohol treatment center before college. I’d also pull them out of college temporarily to make sure they got treatment before they continued school. They’d not only be safer, they’d get a better education.

Did you know that binge drinking – which is how a lot of drinking in college is done, not in some moderate fashion, and it only consists of 4 or 5 drinks at a time – affects the brain? Numerous studies have been done.  Some show impaired memory and more than usual concentration necessary to perform simple tasks (even for people who drink like that only once a week), and some show that critical thinking is impaired for an entire month after one night of binge drinking.

Does that sound like the state they should be in to get a college education? Does that sound like an environment you want to send your kid into? I’d go out of my way to keep my kid OUT of college if those were the consequences.

Yes, most kids survive it all. But many continue on to become heavy drinkers throughout their lives. Not to mention that the vast majority of people graduating college don’t get a job doing what they studied for. Could it be they were too out of it to even know that they weren’t really interested in what they were studying?

It’s time to start taking college a little more seriously. And it’s up to the parents to make sure that’s how their kids feel about it, too. Shore them up against the college environment with alcohol and drug education, even if that means getting them through an alcohol and drug treatment program before they go, and make sure they have a real purpose for the college education they’ll be getting; that will also help keep them focused.

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If you’ve ever been to a college football game, a frat party, prom party, or anything similar, you won’t notice too many beer cans or bottles around. Why? They buy it in kegs – a keg holds 15.5 gallons – the equivalent of 165 12-oz. cans of beer. And if they buy domestic beer, it will only cost them about $40, plus a not-too-expensive refundable deposit on the keg itself. Is it any wonder why we have so many young alcoholics checking into alcohol rehab and alcohol detox, so many more getting injured and ill from binge drinking, and so many car accidents and even alcohol-related deaths?

In New York, where one in three college-age kids drinks and one in 10 adults actually has an alcohol problem, they’re putting new restrictions on beer kegs to try to help the problem. A registration tag will be put on the kegs identifying the buyer and seller (and there’s a fine of $250 to $450 for damaging or removing the tag), and the deposit on kegs is being raised from $50 (that’s the NY deposit cost) to $75.

Studies have shown that raising taxes on alcohol may have acted as a mild deterrent, but in a college environment I don’t know how much it will help. With 20 people splitting the cost each person only has to come up with $7.00 and they’re going to get half of that back when they return the keg. Even 5 people would only have to come up with $28 - and there aren’t too many college kids that don’t have $28, especially when they’re going to get half of that returned.

However, many of them would probably have trouble coming up with that amount 2 or 3 times a week, though. So I guess that’s where the deterrent effect comes in.

Obviously, the best deterrent is the person not wanting to drink that much (or at all.) If that’s not the case, though, they may need alcohol rehab – which you can get through an alcohol and drug addiction treatment center. Don’t go for just a detox – that dries them out but does nothing to handle the urge to drink or the person’s ability to quit drinking.

Did you know that one night of binge drinking (that’s five drinks for a guy, four for a girl) impairs critical thinking for a month? Not only is the college kid in danger of becoming an alcoholic, he’s also pretty much wasting his education. Check out alcohol rehab.

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Last week I wrote a blog about people being unaware of why they drink – like the young man who’s only explanation was “I like a few beers when I get home from a day at work.” They know, really, that they shouldn’t drink as much as they do but they never look at why they’re drinking so much. They’ll look at that, and discover the reasons why, if they go to alcohol rehab. But it’s not likely without it.

I recently ran across a disturbing statistic about this unawareness from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI at cspinet.org) – 48% of college drinkers report that “drinking to get drunk” is an important reason for drinking.

Tha certainly explains why you don’t get anywhere when you ask them why they don’t just have one or two drinks and leave it at that – an experience I’m sure 99% of those who have a heavy drinker in the family have had.

What purpose does getting drunk serve? It’s way beyond ’social drinking’ at that point. They want to reach oblivion – reach the point where they are semi-conscious (or unconscious.) Only then do whatever demons they’re fighting move into the shadows.

That’s why the expertise of an experienced drug counselor who can get an answer to the obvious next question – why do you want to get drunk? – is so vital. Until the drinker knows the answer to that question, he’s not going to be able to resolve the drinking problem.

And that’s why you need to address the problem in an addiction treatment center. Give us a call to find out more today.

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I hope the news articles on the recent death of 19-year-old Jason Wren, a student at the University of Kansas who died after a night of binge drinking, alerted parents to the discrepancies in the application of the law regarding students’ privacy and the practice of informing parents, or not, when students have a problem with drug or alcohol addiction or abuse.

According to Jason’s father, he knew his son had an alcohol problem before he sent him off to university and, had he known it was still a problem – he did send him to a ‘dry’ school so he did have reason to believe it would not be a problem – he would have brought him home where he could keep an eye on him.

Instead, he didn’t find out about the problems Jason was having until attending his son’s memorial service at the school, where he was allowed to see his son’s records for the first time. His son was on probation in his residence hall for alcohol violations, hadn’t shown up for the personal counseling session he was supposed to get because of it, and hadn’t done the required alcohol abuse course.

The school provost – a high ranking official, this one responsible for student success (!) - had the nerve to say that “there is no national evidence that parental notification makes a difference.”

I beieve that’s the lamest, most irresponsible, insensitive excuse I’ve ever heard. Someone’s son just died and she’s being a politician – covering her ass.

The law states that parents should be informed in an emergency. Until 2007, ‘emergency’ was defined as an ‘extreme situation’. After a student at Virginia Tech shot and killed himself and 32 others in April of that year, the definiton changed to a ‘significant threat to the health or safety of the student or other individuals.’

Well – that’s obviously open to interpretation. Ask 10 people on the street what they would consider a ‘significant threat to the health or safety of the student or other individuals’ and you’ll get 10 different answers. And it’s been proven that even the so-experts – psychiatrists – can’t predict whether someone’s dangerous or not. How is some administrator at a school, or a school council, going to do it?

What should you do? Jason’s father sent him to a ‘dry’ school; obviously, that wasn’t enough.

Where college-aged sons  and daughters with alcohol problems should go is to alcohol rehab. Not university. And if they’re taking drugs, do the same. Get them into an addiction treatment center - a long-term residential treatment program that will take however many months are needed to get down to the bottom of the problem so your kid CAN and WILL say no when the time comes.

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