Dying to drink: the toxic cultural phenomenon of blackout drinking
“Take this, you look like you need it.”
I was visiting a friend who had graduated the year before me during my senior year in high school. To say the college process had been stressful would be the understatement of the century. I was more than ready to let loose and have fun. We had already taken three shots of Peach Svedka vodka in her cramped dorm room with her five closest friends before heading to one of the many frat parties happening on campus that weekend.
Once at a party, we made our way over to the pong table and she handed me a red solo cup of “jungle juice,” saying, “Forget the stress! Let’s just have fun tonight!”
This was my first introduction to the “blackout” — the idea that, to let loose and have fun, one must drink to the point that they have submersed themselves in so much alcohol that they have little to no recollection of the night before.
Much of this trend is derived from the fact that society and media have created the expectation that drinking, and drinking heavily, is just a part of the college experience. In fact, according to NPR, federal health officials say that “more than 80 percent of college students drink,” and “about half say they binge drink. This means more than four drinks for women and more than five drinks for men, within a two-hour time frame.”
The report continues, saying these habits can be explained by “the unfortunate collision of the brain’s biology with a hard-to-resist environment,” which means that at 18-years old (the age of the average first-year student), the brain, still deemed adolescent, is exposed to this extreme and culturally-accepted behavior. It is not until your mid-20s that the brain is fully developed, and before this occurs, the part of the brain that seeks reward and stimulation is at its peak.
What makes this overlap most dangerous is that the part of the brain that is capable of controlling impulsive behavior is also not yet fully developed in 18- and 19-year olds. Thus, people at this age who heavily drink are more likely to participate in risky behavior such as drinking and driving, going swimming, and having unprotected sexual contact.
This is an important reality that leads to the unfortunate statistics from a recent New York Times article that say, “More than 1,800 students die every year of alcohol-related causes. An additional 600,000 are injured while drunk, and nearly 100,000 become victims of alcohol-influenced sexual assaults. One in four say their academic performance has suffered from drinking.”
The question remains, what leads people to transition from recreational drinking to pursuing the phenomenon that is the blackout?
In short: stress.
Small, elite colleges are pressure cookers for stress and competition among peers. Students are constantly trying to outdo the person next to them with grades, extracurricular activities, sports, and internships. Worse, no matter how much you do or how well you do it, it never feels like enough. The need to create a stacked resume becomes even more intense than it was in high school because it is not just college on the line, but a job and real life. It becomes an obsession.
This leads students to drinking as an escape. It becomes a recognized and accepted way to relieve stress. Especially at small colleges, one becomes too comfortable with his or her surroundings and feels safe getting drunk to the point of blacking out because it is relatively easy to make it back to one’s dorm on a compact campus.
Additionally, we mutually support each other in this practice. We think it is funny to show your friends videos of themselves the next day after a night of “blacking out,” telling them stories about what they said to people, who they made out with, validating their actions, and subconsciously encouraging them to do it again.
Even if you do not personally participate in this phenomenon, you accept that it is a normality. Any criticism of such habits would likely be perceived as “too judgmental.”
The issue of blackout culture is not going away anytime soon as long as we continue to support it. We need to be educated on the long-term effects of binge drinking, like nerve and liver damage, depression, seizures, and cancer, as well as the short-term effects like alcohol poisoning, increased risk of sexual assault, and injuries.
As long as we continue to treat binge drinking and the blackout culture as an accepted coping mechanism for stress, social anxiety, and other issues, it will continue to be a problem plaguing college campuses. We need to dispel with the notion that Ashton Katherine Carrick outlines in The New York Times: “At the end of the day, for a lot of students, forgetting will always be the best option.”
