New ad aims to curb drinking

Full-page ads for "binge beer" in several national newspapers today might surprise readers.

But after a quick read it's clear that the tongue-in-cheek "beer ads," supported by 113 university presidents including University President Lee Bollinger, actually aim to raise public awareness of the dangers of binge drinking.

"It's important for the University to address this problem in a variety of ways," Bollinger said. "No decent university can stand by and be inactive in the face of binge drinking."

Experts define binge drinking as consuming five or more successive drinks for men and four or more successive drinks for women.

The ad features a beer bottle labeled "Binge Beer" with the headline "Hitting college campuses this fall."

Text underneath the bottle reads in part: "It's tough to be a college kid today. That's why we developed Binge Beer ... we understand that sometimes you just need five or six drinks the night before that big test ... Who says falling off a balcony is such a bad thing? And what's an occasional riot? Or even a little assault between friends?"

But the ad campaign, launched by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, is not targeting college students, said Steve MacCarthy, the Executive Director of University Relations at Penn State University.

"The point is really to make parents as well as opinion-makers aware of the problem," MacCarthy said. "We're hoping parents will sit down and talk to their kids about the issue."

He cited the 1997 Youth Risk Behavior Survey which found that more than one-third of first-year college students are already drinkers when they enter college.

The idea for the ad, which appears today in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal among other newspapers, sprouted at Penn State.

Penn State President Graham Spanier, who developed the idea for the ad, found that many alumni and other university presidents didn't understand his concern about the binge drinking problem on campuses, MacCarthy said.

"They were asking him why he was making such a big deal about it," MacCarthy said. "There are huge differences inter-generationally. The magnitude of the problem today far exceeds what it used to be."

According to a national survey released by the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention, between 75 percent and 90 percent of all violence on college campuses is alcohol-related.

About 300,000 of today's college students will eventually die from alcohol-related causes including drunk driving accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, various cancers and heart disease, estimates the Core Institute, an organization that studies college drinking.

The University's Binge Drinking Task Force plans to discuss parental notification, in which the University would send notices to the parents or guardians of minors who receive alcohol violations, as a strategy to reduce binge drinking, said Vice President for Student Affairs E. Royster Harper.

Harper said the ad campaign is aimed more toward parents of high school and junior high students than those of college students.

Citing recent studies, Harper said many pre-college students begin drinking earlier. "K through 12 has implications for college," she said.

Money from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Barnes & Noble, Inc. and 113 universities around the country funded the ad campaign.

Other university presidents who financially supported the ad campaign include M. Peter McPherson of Michigan State University and William Kirwan of Ohio State University.

09-10-99