There was one big surprise in this September’s round of media coverage of campus and under-age drinking issues as another school season opened. In addition to the usual hand-wringing about binge drinking on campus, a new book titled “Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You,” and its author, ex-Time editor Barrett Seaman, got some attention with a contrary view. The magazine ran an essay by Seaman that ad-vanced a theme sounded occasionally by college ad-ministrators. “Tighter enforcement of the minimum drinking age of 21 is not the solution,” Seaman be-lieves. Rather, “it’s part of the problem.” Seaman’s research on a dozen campuses in the US and Canada showed that in the 1990s campus drinking shifted “from beer to hard liquor, consumed not in large so-cial settings, since that is now illegal, but furtively and dangerously in students’ residences.” Seaman points out that none of the college presidents he spoke to believed “that the 21-year age minimum helps their efforts to curb the abuse of alcohol.” Instead, the law impedes those efforts because it “takes away the abil-ity to monitor and supervise drinking activity.”

Compared to the widespread “pre-gaming” style of consumption he found on American campuses (that’s heavy consumption of “as much hard liquor as possi-ble” before going out to parties), he found a “saner approach” to drinking at McGill University in Montreal where the drinking age is 18. Many Ameri-can students there do drink heavily at first, Seaman points out, but by mid-term exams “the vast majority have put drinking into its practical place among their priorities.” At McGill, alcohol “was there, it was available; they didn’t feel the need to drink as much as possible because they knew they could get it any-where,” Seaman told The Vancouver Sun. A McGill official said: “Our basic management philosophy is respect. We don’t have a lot of the ‘Thou shalt not’ rules… Balance is important.” Students have “direct access” to senior officials at the school “and a healthy respect for us… I won’t hesitate to put my foot down, but I’ll have a beer with them too.” Imagine that! Seaman believes dialogue is the key to safe campus environments. “There are smart ways of drinking and there are stupid ways of drinking. If you can get more people drinking smartly, you’re going to have a safer campus.” Congress is not likely to take Seaman’s ad-vice to “reverse a bad policy” anytime soon, but it’s heartening to see such a call in the mainstream media.

ABC News also picked up this theme in a September 7 story: “Binge Drinking Entrenched in College Cul-ture.” The story quoted Prof. Hoyt Alverson at Dart-mouth who pointed out that “heavy drinking is… ritually scripted on campuses.” He also believes the 21 yr-old minimum age “has been counterproductive.” ABC also noted social norms and other education-oriented programs being adopted across the US (see below). It quoted an assistant in the Department of Alcohol and Drug Education and Prevention at Colo-rado State University. CSU adopted a harm reduction approach in the wake of a much-publicized student death last year. “Scare tactics are out the door,” she said. But ABC News gave the last word to Seaman: “Students are very open about [alcohol and drugs]. If you treat them as adults, they’ll act like adults.” Could this signal a shift in the winds?