With the new semester, BU has resumed its campaign against alcohol abuse, bolstering police patrols of known party neighborhoods, citing students for public intoxication, dispersing loud parties—and crucially, publicizing statistics on booze-control efforts by University, Boston, and Brookline police.
The graphic above shows last weekend’s enforcement statistics. See statistics from prior weekends below.
I litteratur cannot believe this is a thing. Really BU, really?! I mean, people drink! Get over it! What is this some prohibition campaign?
When people drink responsibly its not an issue. However, when 12 people need to be transported to hospitals there is a serious issue. It seems almost every year a student at one of the schools in the Boston area dies from alcohol poisoning.
If you want to be treated as an adult, act like one. Don’t go to a party with the intent of seeing how much alcohol you can pour down your throat.
The school is trying to avoid making the most horrific phone call you can ever imagine; calling a parent and telling them that their child is dead. A needless death brought about by abject stupidity.
Many years ago, I had to tell my grandmother that her daughter, my aunt had died. You can’t begin to imagine the look of anguish on her face.
in all fairness, I went to college when the drinking age was 18. Although people drank many times to excess, I never experienced one case where a student had to be taken to a hospital let alone died. The great mystery of alcohol was gone by the time we got to college. Yes it made it a problem in high school, but isn’t it still a problem in high school today? and isn’t it better to deal with this problem in high school where parents are around than when a student is experiencing his or her perhaps first experience living away from home?
I agree. I went to school at the same time and lived with the football team on West Campus. We had parties most weekends, but there was none of the binge drinking that you see today.
I think the drinking age should be lowered back down to 18, so it would not be such a big deal in college. You are correct in saying that by the time we went to college our parents had helped us to learn what was sensible behavior.
The problem is, BUs determination of who needs to get transported is inconsistent and inaccurate. I saw a kid get transported once for tripping while walking into the dorm room.
Agreed. It’s the policy to transport anyone who appears to be drunk, even if they are pretty much fine and happen to make one false move.
Some of the transports are necessary, but many of them are just a precaution and the student is released when they sober up.
While it doesn’t appear that students are as concerned about themselves as we are, and obviously, the program is not necessarily deterring alcohol consumption, It is good to know that campus police are protecting our kids! While the kids believe that Partying is the their rite to passage into Adulthood, learning to drink responsibly can Literally save your life! The majority of students is under age to drink! Police are not prohibitions,they are meerly protecting children from themselves!(and protecting your financial investment in COLLEGE EDUCATION
BU never disappoints…. on the 13th anniversary of an event that literally changed every Americans life and ended the lives of 3000 innocent people ( many from the boston area) there is not one word, not one article of mention of it. Thank you for meeting my expectations once again
Well, it looks like most people got over it. You should probably do the same. And FYI, about 14000 children die of starvation everyday in the world.
God help you. Please do not mock such horrific events and compare one person’s suffering from that of another. No one is perfect.
“Steady” has a point, and I understand that you may not feel the same way, but please do not compare terrorism with starvation.
14,000 children die a day because of government policies, corporate policies and local (to them) terrorism.
The USA one-time experience with terrorism on 9/11, is not really a one time event. The twin towers were attacked before, I was on the phone to someone in the twin towers when the parking lot bomb went off in 1993. Terrorism attacks of trains were happening in France. Terrorism is a constant of life in Palestine, Syria and other places.
It is totally appropriate to compare OUR RESPONSE to other nations children dying to OUR RESPONSE to a PTSD inducing event in OUR past.
In my opinion, if you think about how other people owe you compassion. You must also think about how you owe them compassion. I GUARANTEE you that most people in the world have suffered things much worse than most Americans on 9/11 – including those children who die every day.
What a heartless comment. All those innocent lives lost on our soil and you simply brush them off?
The publication is devoted to TODAY’S news
I “litteratur” cannot believe the number of ignorant students that are admitted to this University.
First, in response to the comment made by “Normal Person”, yes, people do drink. The difference does not lay in whether someone drinks or not, though, but rather HOW they consume. For responsible individuals, drinking means having wine or beer with a meal, or maybe after work or at a social gathering with the total number of drinks not exceeding 2 or 3. Responsible drinking also means knowing how to enjoy alcohol, and not abuse alcohol. What drinking does not mean is sitting in a cramped dorm room taking shots of vodka before going out to stand in a crowded fraternity house basement and subsequently consuming an even larger amount of alcohol. Quantity, environment, and purpose is key when it comes to alcohol consumption. The vast (and I cannot stress this enough) majority of students at Boston University that I have witnessed drinking do NOT drink responsibly. That is why the University and the BUPD have this campaign. It is not a prohibition campaign, it is a campaign to curb abusive behavior.
Also, there still stands the blatant fact that anyone under the age of twenty-one is breaking the law by drinking, but since that’s a more sensitive topic I will omit any comment on it.
Most importantly, so many students at Boston University are so privileged that they forget just how much money it costs them and their parents to study here. You do not seek entrance at a University to spend four years partying, though, many students may hold that belief. Yes, you are here to have fun and enjoy a period of your life that you’ll always remember. That means meeting new people and having novel experiences. But you are also here to learn and to study. All of these goals can be accomplished WITHOUT the abuse of alcohol.
breaking the law in 2014: 1) not declaring every dollar on your income tax punishable by jail time
2) taking an allergy pill and driving a motor vehicle
3)turning on your cell phone in an airplane
the point is there are many laws and many ways to break the law. All of this is a moot point as higher education in the very near future will be much different than it is today. Gone will be the traditional notion of a campus and all the expense that entails. All the overhead, inflated salaries of administrators and others who live off the fat of the land like 15th century Italian cardinals will be gone. Perhaps education will than be the province of everyone again , not just the “privileged” you refer to.
This sounds like the spouting of a Fox News anchor. Overly dramatic, and frankly, completely off-topic.
I do agree that steady made a ridiculous statement, but if you think that what he said has anything to do with conservatism or Fox News, you’re as unintelligent as him. And I don’t even like Fox News.
I am all for this campaign. I am a married graduate student and I live in Allston with my husband. We moved from out of town and weren’t aware of the area. There is nothing more frustrating then laying in bed awake at two AM because there are drunk students yelling in the streets and partying outside. The weekends are the worst, but it happens during the week too. It is so disrespectful! If they want to drink and hang out fine, but do it responsibly and respectfully. I am ashamed that my fellow students act the way they do. The neighborhood is trashed. Broken glass and garbage everywhere. I think the students need to be aware of their actions, and how it affects the people around them.
A large amount of the drunkenness that you see every weekend (and Thursday) is specifically because of this policy. BU’s zero-tolerance alcohol policy forces students out of the safety of the dorms into Allston. RA’s are trained to go out of their way to find drug (yes, alcohol is a drug) use, so students go to less patrolled, and therefore less safe, areas. When caught, there is an automatic fine and depending upon the substance, students can be thrown out of housing on the first offence. On the other hand, an underage student caught drunk by a Boston cop (not BUPD) is sent home with a slap on wrist. There is a problem when the university has a tougher stance on drugs than the city/state/country do.
Actually, BU does not have a “zero-tolerance” dorm policy on alcohol. Students who are 21+ are allowed to have and consume a specified amount of alcohol in their rooms. And yes, although RAs are obligated to address a situation where they may find people consuming alcohol who are underage, it’s not like they’re patrolling around specifically looking for that. Most alcohol policy violations actually begin with the fact that students in a dorm are being excessively loud, and the alcohol is found secondarily.
Furthermore, I’m not sure where you got the information about an automatic fine and/or threat of being immediately thrown out of housing for alcohol consumption. Both of those statements are simply not true.
Not true, BU RA’s are forced to patrol dorms and knock on doors every Thursday-Sunday. Anyone who believes that students aren’t forced to go out to places like Allston to hangout and be a normal college student is dead wrong.
RAs are not forced to knock on doors. They only do so when a room is too loud, usually to the point where someone else living on the floor (non-RA) calls them to address it. What would you argue is a better policy for the university? If people were smart about the way they drink they should have no issues. Instead, binge-drinking seems to be most popular, and it’s much more difficult for BU/RAs to overlook that.
Plus, you aren’t even allowed to have a 30 rack of beer or a whole handle of alcohol. These amounts have been deemed excessive by the university. It seems like even if you are 21 and living in a BU dorm, you still have limited rights when it comes to alcohol.
From a public health perspective, motor vehicle deaths due to drunken driving went way down in this age group, when the drinking age was change from 18 to 21. Changing the drinking age back is not necessarily the answer.
Okay, then raise the “adult” age for everything then. If someone can go be slaughtered in war at 18 then that same person should be allowed to have a beer. Either we raise everything to 21 or lower everything to 18. I don’t see a point in saying oh you’re an adult, you can vote, go to war, etc. but hey you can’t drink because you’re not mature enough for that. I do realize that there are some implications considering that a person’s frontal lobe is not fully developed until the early 20s, but otherwise the logic just isn’t there to justify the drinking age.
I whole heartedly support BU enforcing the laws against underage drinking and encouraging those of age to drink responsibly. It is a college epidemic lowering inhibition and putting young people at risk. I don’t understand why everyone just accepts it as a right of passage. There is much to experience, so much to learn and life to enjoy without the numbing effects of alcohol.
I agree. I don’t think “college kids will be college kids” on drinking is any better argument than “boys will be boys” on bullying.
and BTW, I never liked the theory of “lowering inhibitions” for alcohol. While alcohol does create a myopia of flaws, it also creates an inflated self assessment and sense of self importance. A person who thinks of themselves as a good dancer will think of themselves as a great dancer and ignore facts. A person who thinks of themselves as a bit of a slut will think themselves VERY slutty on alcohol. A person who thinks of themselves as a fact based decision maker will become pedantic. – – – You could characterize this as inhibition, but it is more like exposing their inner self assessment to the world – and often exposing the more disgusting elements of themselves.
Folks are having the wrong discussion here. More than a dozen students were transported to hospital emergency rooms. Many/most/all would have had their stomachs pumped because they had been poisoned by drinking too much alcohol too fast. They were at risk of death. Don’t miss this fact.
It’s important to realize that more than Boston University students engage in reckless, dangerous behavior with alcohol in the “campus” area (roughly west from Mass. Ave., south of the Charles River. north of much of Beacon St., and Harvard Ave, and east from some ill-defined point in Allston/Brighton). Particularly noteworthy are MIT fraternity houses that specialize in falls from 3rd-floor balconies (one this autumn right next to Shelton Hall). Not too many years ago an MIT student drank himself to death in one of these local institutions (that may not be an isolated case…). The “we’re grown up now and don’t need any further guidance in safe and healthy behavior” attitude is flatly self-contradictory. It’s a moral (and practical) obligation of human beings to look out for and protect one another. Ditto for institutions — universities, police, and … fraternities? In the Judeo-Christian bible, after Cain murders his brother Abel, God asks him “Where is your brother?” Like a good debater, Cain replies, “I don’t know, am I my brother’s keeper?” Tellingly, God does not answer this question… How should we answer?
And in case anyone is unsure, pumping your stomach is not a fun event. It is actually done via a nasal-gastric (ng) tube. This involves you having a tube inserted in your nose that you then have to swollow. Not a pleasant event and not worth getting drunk over!
I study hard, get good grades but I do enjoy intoxicating myself with mind altering substances on the weekends (including alcohol and nicotine) to meet people, hook up with girls and have fun. I choose to do so responsibly and I don’t understand why everybody is making such a big deal out of other irresponsible adults that drink in excess. If you don’t want people to abuse alcohol, make people choose not to abuse it. Otherwise all those stats and policies are pointless.
Hey…..”BU Student”….. you wrote:
“… I don’t understand why everybody is making such a big deal out of other irresponsible adults that drink in excess.”
As a parent of a BU student….this is why we make a big deal out of it:
1) poor decision making tends to happen when excessive drink occurs
2) excessive drinking can impact others
3) young adults have died from excessive drinking
4) your parents are paying the bill if you are not on a full ride for sports/academics so we think we have some leverage in the conversation
5) there are more productive ways to have fun; you just are too immature and have yet to figure that out
The stats are a way to gauge the overall behavior of the student body. Publishing them out creates transparency and allows us (the paying customer) to know what is going on with the student body. Tracking these on a regular frequency helps keep this in the conversation with the BU community.
“your parents are paying the bill if you are not on a full ride for sports/academics so we think we have some leverage in the conversation”
Ha! Must have missed the memo on that one. Being responsible for my own housing and education, I don’t think that I need my parents attempting to dictate my alcohol intake, never mind somebody else’s.
After a day of running around the city working multiple jobs and studying for several classes, I’m really not sure that the lamentations of a “concerned parent” will ever cross my radar when I’m just looking to unwind.
Alcohol poisoning seems to be more of a symptom of bad parenting than anything else. Young adults are going to drink, how much they choose to drink isn’t my problem. Likewise, my drug problems (or drug solutions, really) are none of your business.
“there are more productive ways to have fun; you just are too immature and have yet to figure that out”
Ahh, gardening and watching ESPN until you fall asleep on the couch, truly the paragon of productive fun. In case you’ve forgotten, there are countless clubs and activities available here for the student body, chances are most of them are having more “productive” fun than you are.
fdsa:
Your “drug problems” become part of society’s business when your poor decision making impacts other humans and property. No doubt you are a safe drug user and are concerned about your fellow BU students and other members of the community.
You are in the minority in being self-sufficient to fund your education at BU. I doubt many of your peers are taking on the full responsibility of the educational expense. You are to be commended for having the ability to do this.
Alcohol poisoning seems to be a result of poor decision making more than anything else. I am unclear how you are linking bad parenting to alcohol poisoning. The parents are not the ones ending up as a statistic for Medical Alcohol Transports or receiving summons for Alcohol violations…..it is the BU students.
I am really glad that there are so many clubs and activities available to the BU student population. Wishing you a great semester that does not result in an alcohol violation or Medical Alcohol Transport. I appreciate all the work you are doing to help educate your peers in the risky behavior that the younger generation engages by setting a great example for the BU student body.
Judging how strict the policy is regarding “the odor” of a plant, it’s no wonder there are so many alcoholics here.
I think it’s commendable that they keep the BU community aware of what is going on regarding alcohol abuse etc. It’s always a good conversation starter.
Lowering the drinking age is not the answer either. I can remember in the early 80’s when it was 18, kids were drinking at 16.
I will never forget being at a ‘track team’ party and a friend asked if I could drive home another friend. My friend sat with her in the back bc she was very tipsy. Half way home she said “pull over I think she’s going to get sick!” . So I did and my friend helped her out of the car and as she did she fell backwards & the other friend threw up all over her and her clothes . By the time I got around from the driver side they both were on the strip of grass by the sidewalk . One friend grossed out and freaking out that she was covered in vomit and the other on her back . The one on her back was now choking on the second wave of vomit . I could hear gurgling, I quick turned her over on her side, and reached in her mouth and her tongue was rolled up like a Swiss roll in the back of her mouth. With 3 fingers I flattened it out. I will never forget how hard it was as it is such strong muscle and more vomit came out . It poured down my 17 year old arm. To this day, I still don’t know how I did what I did . Thank God, She seemed better and was breathing normally so we were able to go bring her home. It was tough to tell her older sister that she ‘vomited on the way home and to keep an eye on her’.. We went to this party to have fun. Most at the party, although under age drank responsibly . No one had any idea this friend was mixing beer and booze etc. Had she thrown up in her sleep , she would’ve died. I’ve told this story to my children (2 BU students)and hope it helps them to see overindulging in alcohol can be fatal and poisoning is real. I think whenever kids get that first found freedom they go ‘hog wild’. I would like to think they will not drink until ‘legal ‘ but I know it’s unrealistic. I just try hammer home the moderation part, eating, healthy mind/body, and being ‘brother’s keeper’. Thank God BU police, Brookline police and RAs are going that extra mile to keep our kids safe, in the attempt to avoid a tragedy.
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