Eve Tucker has downed 11 beers. Her left little toe is bleeding from a cut from a broken beer bottle. It’s 1 a.m., and the bar has closed. But Tucker is not ready for home.
She and college roommate Kristen Hoglund stand along the strip of campus bars, glued to their cellular phones, trying to find a late-night party to mark the end of the school year.
“We need to find somewhere to go,” said Tucker, 21, a bar napkin wrapped around her toe. “I’m so not done drinking.”
Hundreds of other college students linger outside on this early Saturday morning in May, just after finals week at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The students are animated, waving their arms under the lights of Green Street. Some love everyone, and some try to pick fights, even with a road-construction sign. Some can barely walk. Blocks away, students streak naked through the quad, as onlookers rate the streakers on a scale of 1 to 10.
For years, studies have pointed out that college students drink too much alcohol. And for years, colleges have tried to rein in problem drinking–by educating students, trying to peer-pressure students into abstinence and clamping down on rowdy fraternities.
At U. of I., efforts over the last decade have led to some improvements. Crime has dropped significantly on campus. A new office coordinates help for students with alcohol and drug problems. Students in the most recent U. of I. survey said they consume on average 5.2 drinks every week, compared with 6.8 drinks a week 10 years earlier.
Still, new surveys, a federally appointed task force and testimony at a recent U.S. Senate committee hearing show that none of the efforts nationwide have managed to curb college binge drinking, considered to be five drinks for a man and four for a woman in one sitting in the previous two weeks.
And while no one knows why, binge drinking is growing increasingly common in Illinois. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association published last week showed that the percentage of adult binge drinkers–defined as anyone who consumes five drinks or more once in the previous month–in Illinois jumped from 7.3 percent in 1991 to 13.9 percent in 1999, the highest increase in the nation.
The consequences of such drinking can be deadly. Among college students, there are about 1,400 alcohol-related deaths every year, and 500,000 unintentional injuries, according to “A Call to Action,” the federal task force report released in April. Students who drink excessively are more likely than non-drinkers to be injured, get bad grades, damage property and suffer health problems, research shows.
Students might seem aware of these facts, but most don’t change. At U. of I., where the alcohol is as cheap and available as soft drinks, students surveyed said they drank to loosen their inhibitions, have fun, deal with stress and increase their opportunities for sex.
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On the weekends, Tucker and Hoglund often qualify as binge drinkers. Four drinks? Tucker put away a six-pack over four hours on a Friday afternoon, before she even knew where she’d be drinking that night.
“I enjoy drinking,” said Tucker, who says she normally has seven drinks a night, two or three nights a week. “It’s fun. It’s a social activity. As long as you can control it, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”
Started in high school
Both Tucker and Hoglund started drinking in high school–peppermint schnapps swiped from a liquor cabinet, beer bought through acquaintances over 21. But they played sports, earned mostly B’s and studied hard enough to get into U. of I..
Neither were serious troublemakers in high school, they say.
Tucker, who grew up outside of Carbondale, rode horses through her childhood and always hoped to be a veterinarian. This year, though, she switched her major to food science.
Hoglund, now 20, grew up in Libertyville. She became fascinated by the weather when she was a kid, after a tornado warning terrified her. Now, she is one of only a few undergraduates studying meteorology.
The two women met at the Tau Epsilon Phi fraternity house, when Hoglund was a freshman and Tucker was a sophomore. They earn mostly B’s and C’s, and both expect to graduate next year.
When they go out at night, they wear the same uniform: hip-hugging jeans, tank tops and chunky heels. Hoglund wears her brown hair neatly trimmed beneath her shoulders. Tucker, whom Hoglund sometimes calls “Evil,” wears her blond hair wild, down to the middle of her back. As the night goes on, Tucker seems to switch her hairstyle with every beer–she pulls it into a ponytail, she lets it down, she clips it up.
They say they are controlled drinkers: They don’t vomit, they don’t black out. Their drunken escapades are more silly than dangerous: They bring cookies to firefighters or steal things like a lamp and martini shaker from a friend.
Asked why they drink, Hoglund and Tucker say because it’s fun. It’s just not something they think about, let alone talk about. While sober, they say they don’t have alcohol problems, and neither do their friends. Not the guy who drives home, after saying he drank at least 30 beers. Not the guy whose foot was run over by a bus. Not the guy who punches parking meters.
“This is just college experimentation,” Tucker said. “Everyone does it.”
Hoglund always carries a reminder to be careful: a key chain bearing a high school friend’s nickname.
Just after Hoglund’s freshman year in college, he died in a car accident on the way home from a party. He wasn’t legally drunk, but the driver had a blood-alcohol concentration almost three times the limit.
“It didn’t change my drinking patterns,” Hoglund said. “But it did change how I view driving and drinking.”
Finals week celebrations
Every night of finals week, someone celebrates. Students travel in packs with matching T-shirts: “Another Day Another Dude, Another Bar Another Beer.” “If you weren’t wasted, the night was.”
The 36,000 students at U. of I. can choose from 13 campus bars, all within stumbling distance from home. One recent study has found higher levels of binge-drinking among students when a large number of businesses sell alcohol within 1 mile of campus.
For students, beer is the drink of choice, though some opt for drinks lit up with glow-in-the-dark sticks. Others swallow Jell-O shots, and some share pitchers of hard-liquor concoctions. Five minutes inside any bar, and a person’s clothes will smell like cigarettes for days.
The bars sell beer for as little as $1–cheap drinks encourage young people with less money to drink more, according to the “A Call to Action” report. For only $10, you can binge drink and leave a tip.
Most bars announce “last call” so long before the 1 a.m. closing time, people can buy two drinks before closing. The task force report notes that shouting “last call” can entice people to drink faster.
The Champaign bars also open their doors to 19-year-olds. Stamps and wristbands are given to those who meet the 21-year-old legal drinking age. But the bars get crowded, and people line up three deep to buy beers. No one really pays attention to why a 21-year-old buys two or three beers at a time.
Hoglund won’t turn 21 until next fall, so Tucker buys her beers.
Bars cut people off, if they’re obviously drunk, workers say. John Manganaro, who works at two campus bars, says he throws people out if they throw up or fall asleep at the bar. Spotting underage drinkers can be more difficult.
“It’s not our problem–well, it is,” Manganaro said. “At the same time, I feel bad and everything, but there’s always ways around it and many of us are too busy to card every person that gets a drink. It’s unrealistic.”
Like college movie set
Tucker and Hoglund picked their apartment partly because it was only a block away from the TEP fraternity house, where they met and many of their friends live.
During finals week, the TEP house looks like a college movie set. The floor is covered with plastic cups and beer cans.The trash can overflows with pizza and beer boxes. The handrails are sticky. The stairway is used for sledding.
“You’ve seen `Animal House,’ haven’t you?” said Joshua Roberts, 22, who flunked out of U. of I. after his freshman year but still spends a lot of time at the fraternity house.
The fraternity is one of 53 at U. of I., which has one of the largest Greek systems in the country. Such a distinction also points to drinking: A recent Harvard School of Public Health study says 75 percent of Greek men qualify as binge drinkers.
The TEP house is just an average good-time house, members say. Last fall, the house’s average GPA was 2.77 out of 4.0, worse than 42 other fraternities on campus, but not bad enough to be put on academic probation. It also hasn’t been cited with any recent alcohol violations, school officials say.
At U. of I., the fraternities have started policing themselves. They aren’t supposed to have kegs, because such quantities encourage drinking to excess. Monitors patrol parties, to make sure chapters follow the rules. Seven fraternities have banned alcohol.
In the past three years, there has been only one major alcohol violation at a fraternity, officials say. In the fall of 1999, Phi Kappa Tau threw a party that sent three pledges to the hospital for alcohol poisoning.
Champaign is certainly not what it used to be. In the early ’90s, competition led some bars to sell drafts for a nickel and pitchers for a quarter. Police referred to bars’ closing time as “fight night.”
But since 1994, violent crime on campus has dropped 70 percent, according to last year’s alcohol enforcement summary. City and university officials, as well as local police, say the decrease is due to police efforts to curb underage drinking.
College officials also point to their own efforts to fight problem drinking. In the mid-’90s, officials talked so much about drinking, students started thinking everyone did it, said Bill Murphy, a college spokesman. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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So now, officials don’t talk so much about how everyone drinks. They talk about how much everyone doesn’t drink. This is called “social norming,” but it’s basically peer pressure, and it’s being tried at colleges nationwide. Instead of emphasizing that some people drink too much, the schools point out that most students are responsible drinkers and hope others will follow.
Almost three years ago, U. of I. also created the Alcohol and Other Drug Office, to centralize services for students dealing with drug and alcohol abuse. The university requires counseling for students deemed sick enough by paramedics to be sent to the hospital. This year, there were 82 such cases, although the school does not track how many were on drugs and how many were drunk.
U. of I. also sends a compact disc called “Alcohol 101” to incoming freshmen. The CD features a virtual party and a talking lava lamp named Norm. At the virtual party, students can test their blood-alcohol level after a few drinks–“from point oh-oh to uh-oh.” Such education efforts rarely succeed unless part of a comprehensive program, according to the task force report.
Hoglund said when she got her CD she tried to install it on her computer, but it didn’t work.
Friday is `Case Day’
Tucker and Hoglund spend most of finals week studying and taking tests. They save their big night for Friday, but the drinking starts much earlier. The Friday of finals week is traditionally “Case Day” at the TEP house. Everyone is supposed to start drinking a case of beer at noon.
Tucker arrives about 3:30 p.m., slinging a six-pack of Amstel Light. She is tired, from staying up until dawn, talking to R.J. Pickens, an on-again, off-again boyfriend who has returned to campus for graduation.
Hoglund shows up after her last meteorology final–a presentation on “dust devils,” swirling winds that kick up dirt–and grabs a beer from a cooler.
Some of the fraternity members play drunken whiffle ball. Others rank the looks of women walking by. One guy relieves himself out a window.
A debate begins over what to do later that night. Tucker wants to go to Legends because a friend will be there with his parents. Others grimace. Legends is such a parents bar.
But absent a better idea, Hoglund, Tucker and their friends end up at Legends. Inside the cavernous room, there are indeed parents, places to sit down and old-timey photos on the walls. No one is dancing on tables.
The bar fills up. Tucker buys beers for Hoglund. The group improvises a dance floor, and by midnight, people start hugging and saying they love each other.
They dance; they bump and grind. Friends swirl by. One wants to start a riot on Green Street. Another wants to streak in the quad.
Ten minutes before closing, Tucker tries to buy her 12th beer of the day, but a bartender tells her that it’s closing time.
Pickens throws an empty bottle to the floor. He’s oblivious to the fact that a glass shard has cut Tucker’s toe, peeking from her open-toed shoes. Hoglund bends down and wraps a napkin around her friend’s wound.
The lights flash on, and the floor is covered with a slick of beer, broken glass and drops of Tucker’s blood. Hoglund suggests that Tucker should go to the hospital, but Tucker refuses, and the matter is dropped.
Tucker and Hoglund split off from the guys. They wander about for an hour, vainly looking for a party before heading back to the TEP house. There, the basketball court is covered in broken beer bottles and broken chairs. The wooden dining room chairs are overturned in the front lawn. Inside, frat members praise the skinny guy who punched out a rude stranger on the way home from Legends.
Tucker drinks another two beers, for a total of 13 over 12 hours. Hoglund drinks her seventh. The two women amble home. They’re giggling, but not stumbling or slurring words.
Minutes later, Roberts and Pickens arrive, pulling a cooler on wheels behind them, filled with beer. They joke around, they hang out. Finally, they decide to go to bed. It’s 3:45 a.m.
Tucker tells Roberts, who says he has drunk more than 30 beers, that he can stay on the couch. But he walks back to the fraternity to see if anyone is awake. The next morning, he tells Tucker that he drove home.
Tucker and Hoglund wake up about 11:30 a.m. Saturday and say they feel fine.
The day ahead is a busy one: They need to pack up their belongings before heading to summer jobs. They need to go sell back their textbooks.
And they need to figure out where they’ll spend their last night on campus.