Is Preventing College Drinking Like the Tail Wagging the Dog?

For better than 25-years, those concerned about the academic success and well-being of collegians have viewed the prevention of high-risk and dangerous drinking as a top priority. Social scientists have provided valuable insight as to ways to reduce high-risk drinking as well as effective ways to intercede with those students as well as present them with opportunities to review their choices and moderate their consumption. This, as one can imagine, is the "good news" in a good-news-bad-news consideration of contemporary collegiate life. The "bad news," unfortunately, is that high-risk drinking remains near the top of issues that threaten student success in the pursuit of a post-secondary education.

Even a cursory review of the collegiate drinking literature quickly reveals that researchers and student affairs professionals alike have focused almost exclusively on addressing "the problem." Little if any attention is paid to the behavior of those students who are either moderate in their consumption of alcohol or abstain altogether. Ironically, our efforts to develop prevention strategies may well have contributed, albeit unintentionally, to the apparently intractable nature of high-risk and dangerous collegiate drinking.

By exclusively defining prevention as efforts to moderate student consumption and reduce untoward incidents related to drinking, we inadvertently make the behavior of a minority of college students--albeit a sizable minority--the focus of attention and the issue of primacy when considering collegiate drinking. As Jung once famously quipped, that which you resist persists. In essence, all "collegiate drinking" becomes the problem rather than the high-risk and dangerous drinking that some collegians do--to read more on this, see my monograph, When They Drink: Is Collegiate Drinking the Problem We Think It Is? 

To paraphrase an old cliche, to focus all efforts on trying to stop collegiate drinking...or even trying to stop the minority of students who engage in frequent episodes of high-risk and dangerous drinking (1)...is akin to the "tail wagging the dog." There is much we can learn from listening to what the majority of students who use alcohol moderately or not at all can tell us about why they choose to drink moderately or abstain. If we understood those reasons and directed that knowledge toward efforts to promote low-risk drinking--which includes knowing when to abstain as well as how to moderate consumption when choosing to drink--we may well take efforts designed to foster student wellness to the next level. This is a classic example of moving towards the light rather than away from the darkness.

Broadening our focus from exclusively "preventing high-risk behavior" to also pursuing the "promotion of low-risk behavior" may well enable us to move even closer to the "holy grail" of significantly reducing high-risk and dangerous collegiate drinking even further. NOTE: I do not advocate abandoning what preventionists have been doing for decades but rather, broadening the spectrum and adding to it.

Although an optimist, I am also pragmatic. I realize that there will likely never be a time when there is "zero" high-risk and dangerous drinking on college and university campuses. Just as college students have consumed alcohol for the last 300-years, so will they continue to do so in the future. With that continued drinking comes the consequences associated when consuming to excess. That said, if collegiate drinking is not so much the problem but it is the drinking some collegians do that is, then it is entirely possible that although collegiate drinking continues, a quantifiable reduction in high-risk and dangerous drinking can take place. Realizing this change, however, will likely only occur if and when we broaden our approach to addressing issues of collegiate drinking by focusing as much on the promotion of low-risk behaviors as we currently do on preventing the high-risk.

What do you think?

Dr. Robert

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1 if you have not already guessed, I loathe the term "binge drinking," defined as 5+ drinks for men and 4+ drinks for women - to read more on this March 2010 blog post