 Patricia
Maarhuis, ADCAPS coordinator (right), watches at a Student Recreation
Center health fair as a student tries to walk a straight line while
wearing goggles that distort vision and balance to a degree comparable
to a certain amount of alcohol consumption. Photo courtesy of WSU Today.
Sitting in the Bookie II in Pullman on Dad's Weekend, a stack of
books on the table in front of him and his mother at his side,
Toren is bright-eyed and engaging. Sober for more than a year, he
still isn't sure what his future holds, but for now he is enjoying
visiting college campuses to promote their book and talk about
high-risk drinking.
He smiles when asked if his message today is one he would have
heard four years ago. "I think a lot of people have to run their
course," he says, but everyone is different. "I think social norms
are a good way to bring the average down for people who are in
between."
Patricia Maarhuis, coordinator of WSU's Alcohol and Drug
Counseling, Assessment, and Prevention Services program, agrees.
Social norms theory is part of their approach, she says, but the
emphasis is on "harm reduction." Students who want to drink will
find a way, she says, so counselors try to listen to why students
are engaging in high-risk behavior and then give them the
information they need to make better choices.
Sometimes, she says, students simply need to fully understand
what a single serving of alcohol is. For instance, she says, one
young man didn't understand how a "couple of beers" could cause him
to become drunk. But it turned out that the beers were 40 ounces
each.
Chris Volkman, who earned her teaching credential at WSU, agrees
that part of the problem is our sense of proportion.
"We are in the Super Size generation," she said. "It has changed
since we were in school."
One positive change in the last few years, at least from
Volkmann's perspective, is that colleges are more likely to notify
parents when an underage student is caught with alcohol.
WSU's official alcohol policy states that no underage alcohol
use is permitted, and alcohol use among adults is restricted or
prohibited on University property and in organized living groups
such as residence halls, fraternities, or sororities. On the first
violation of the policy, a student is required to attend a
University-sponsored alcohol education class and, depending on the
severity of the situation, parents might be notified. On the second
offense, parents are notified if the student is underage, and the
student is placed on disciplinary probation. A third offense would
result in parents again being notified and the student being
suspended for a minimum of one semester.
Toren, who maintained good grades throughout college, had a
series of run-ins with school officials who tried to curb his
drinking, but his parents were never notified.
"I did everything in my power to make sure my parents didn't
know," he says.
Volkman and her husband, Don, an anesthesiologist in Olympia,
were themselves responsible social drinkers. On those occasions
when they caught one of their underage sons drinking, they imposed
swift and significant consequences. She and her husband assumed the
problem was maturity, she says, and counseled their sons to make
good choices. But, she says, with Toren, who appears to have
inherited a predisposition to alcoholism, their counsel was too
little, too late.
Now, she says, she realizes that teenage drinking is not
necessarily a phase that young people outgrow. As she writes in
Our Drink, within their family alcohol consumption is now
openly discussed and monitored. "Drinking is now considered as
dangerous as a bad sunburn-a weekend souvenir that can progress to
death," she writes, "the beginning of a haunting cancer."
Indeed, data collected by the National Longitudinal Alcohol
Epidemiologic Survey reveals that young people who begin drinking
before age 15 are four times more likely to develop alcoholism than
those who start drinking at age 21. It is not clear whether
starting to drink at an early age increases one's risk for alcohol
addiction, or whether it simply indicates an existing vulnerability
to high-risk drinking.
Volkmann had long been a journal writer, and in the months
following Toren's admission of a drinking problem, she turned to
her journal again and again to deal with her guilt over what had
happened without her realizing it, her relief over what could have
happened but didn't, and her fear over what might happen in the
future. When her son started sending her long self-revelatory
e-mails from his rehabilitation program, she knew they had a story
to tell. It's a personal story, but it is also a cautionary tale
that speaks to the millions of parents raising adolescents in an
alcohol-saturated culture.
"Our intention was to write down the process of what was
happening to us," Chris says. "Knowing we were creating a book
would have been too frightening. We really were writing it for
ourselves."
Published in August 2004, the 213-page soft-bound book contains
not only the Volkmann's personal story, but an index of alcohol
awareness references and resources, a screening test, and the 12
steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
"I have attempted to keep the focus of this story primarily
based on my experiences with alcohol and how I got to where I am
today," Toren writes toward the end of the book. "This
self-serving, premature memoir-in-a-bottle may be something that
someone else can relate to, appreciate, or learn from, so it may
potentially be of use to people other than my family and me."
Hope Tinney is a writer living in
Pullman.
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