Yale’s drinking culture is completely out of touch with reality.
A Saturday night party on High Street. (Credit: Jack Olson)
Jason Cao
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
Before Yale students step foot on campus as freshmen, all of them complete a mandatory “Work Hard, Play Smart” online course on the dangers of alcohol and the importance of drinking responsibly. Like all mandatory trainings, no one really pays attention to this course, and upon arriving on campus, students newly endowed with personal independence are largely left to fend off the temptation of intoxication by themselves.
As the regular occurrence of ambulances and stretchers on and around Old Campus suggests, many of them fail.
The danger of alcohol cannot be understated. Scientists classify alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen, the highest category, and have demonstrated that there is no “safe” amount of alcohol consumption. In more acute cases, alcohol is also deadly, causing alcohol poisoning or impaired driving, and is directly responsible for the deaths of over 1,500 college students each year. Alcohol-related assaults affect up to 696,000 students per year, and 14% of college students suffer from Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), a brain disorder that leads to impaired cognitive function, anxiety, and depression. Diseases linked to alcohol include hypertension in the heart, atrial fibrillation, liver failure, and many other exceedingly harmful illnesses, as this New York Times explainer details.
These dangers are amplified by our drinking habits. Binge drinking, defined as drinking to the point where the Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) rises above 0.08%, is exceptionally prevalent among young adults. At Yale, binge drinking isn’t seen as a problem; it is the norm. Students who only drink two or three times a month but make sure that they get intoxicated to an exorbitant level qualify as binge drinkers. These periods of intensive drinking, often occurring at parties held on the weekends, are seriously dangerous for young college students, leading to blackouts and overdoses in the short-term and heightened risk of serious diseases like liver cancer in the long-run.
Unfortunately, tragedies from alcohol overdoses are all too common and all too frequent around us. Instances in Cornell, Dartmouth, and Northern Arizona University where students died due to excessive alcohol use remind us that irresponsible consumption of alcohol can very easily turn fatal.
All these factors impel me to be a teetotaler, someone who voluntarily abstains from alcohol entirely. My opposition to alcohol does not come solely from the fact that it is illegal for individuals under 21, although that was for good reason—Congress passed the Minimum Legal Drinking Age Act in 1984 to combat drunk driving, the precipitous decline of which saved 150,000 lives across the next two decades. More importantly, I also sincerely believe that ingesting carcinogens for temporary pleasure and social conformity is a fruitless endeavor. As such, I intend never to drink alcohol.
My parents, having lived most of their lives in China where drinking is even more normalized, have personal experiences of the dangerous effects of alcohol. A staple of business culture in China, alcohol appears on many dinner tables, and social pressure often compels employees to drink with their superiors and clients. After becoming intoxicated from these social functions, those same employees often lash out at friends and family, and in the worst circumstances, become perpetrators of domestic violence. My parents can attest to many instances where friendships and even families broke up because of persistent alcohol issues. These tragedies are the direct cause of a conformist society that treats excessive social drinking as the norm.
The dynamics that my parents have illustrated to me are unfortunately all too often replicated at parties or social gatherings at Yale. Alcoholic drinks are so normalized at formals, parties, and game nights that it is socially deviant to not drink. Many of my friends, who in normal circumstances would not drink, are coerced by social pressure into drinking, which they all too often regret. These perverse social incentives must be changed.
Abstaining from alcohol won’t remove the source of fun from social gatherings; instead, it would make our lives more pleasurable by enabling us to forge deeper connections with our friends and loved ones. In my Yale experience, the greatest moments have come not from simple hedonic pleasures, but from edifying conversations with my friends over philosophy, history, and life. These were conversations where I felt like I was truly learning to understand and appreciate another beautiful soul. Excessive drinking hinders those genuine connections by encouraging irrational decisions and rash speech, reducing our lives to material pleasures.
Yet despite all the clear and serious damage that alcohol does to young college students, Yale has no interest in enforcing any rules on alcohol consumption. First-year counselors (Frocos) do not check for alcohol at all, and do not report instances of alcohol violations. In fact, students can simply carry cases of alcohol into Old Campus dorms, display them in the most prominent places in their living rooms, and host large parties with no resistance or remonstrance from Yale Police or Campus Security. This permissive attitude towards such a great danger is incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, there is much to be done. All of us can take part in resisting the errors of the age and cultivating a campus that no longer treats excessive drinking as the norm. Hosts can stop serving alcohol at social gatherings. Attendees can just say no to alcohol when offered a drink. Frocos can actually start enforcing alcohol rules and confiscating alcohol from irrational 18-year-olds. These changes would make our campus safer, more law-abiding, and would make your Yale experience as a teetotaler more rewarding and fulfilling.