Editor’s note:
The following are responses from two Kings County young adults attending university about the drinking situation.
Binging has become very much a normal/ typical social norm for students and young people.
Why? Probably because that is what is socially accepted and expected.
I don't know if it's a liquid courage thing at the bar to meet people or if everyone else is drunk, so you feel like you should be on the same level for those social interactions? It's a strange trend. But it's totally accepted, if not encouraged, for people my age.
People start feeling like it’s weird to hangout on a Friday, Saturday night and not drink. So we drink. Some people get smashed and then others will just have a few drinks.
Drinking games are a way to get drunk without really thinking about it and they are also ridiculously entertaining ... not to mention you get drunk quite quickly while playing them.
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I feel like people think they can do whatever the hell they want to do when they drink and blame it on blacking out or not remembering it or ‘Oh, sorry I was drunk I didn’t mean to kiss you’, ‘say this to you’, ‘hit this person.’
It’s kind of scary in some sense because the way most people binge drink they won’t remember seeing or saying things or doing things. They wake up and have to map their night back together via texts sent, calls made and the people they were with. And, yes, this has happened to me and it is far from fun when it gets to the point of not remembering. It’s not cool. So I think drinking is a fine social occurrence, but in moderation.
But most university and high school students don’t get the whole moderation thing. Some people I know will drink an entire quart/40 ouncer in one night where others will drink 20 beer ... It is insane.
