Drinking Game Can Be a Deadly Rite of Passage

"Power Hour" is examined in this story from NYT.

Ingrid Young for The New York Times Kayla Peters at a bar in Fargo, N.D., where she was told she could not do a "power hour" to celebrate her 21st birthday.

ARGO, N.D. - The homemade video captures the first hour after the stroke of midnight when the birthday boy turned 21 and could legally drink.

"It's the best time of his life," a friend slurs to the camera. "We've all done it. It's a tradition."

The tradition is "power hour," or "21 for 21," as it is known in some other places across the country: 21-year-olds go to a bar at midnight on their birthdays, flash newly legal identification and then try to down 21 shots in the hour or so before the bar closes, or as fast as possible.

It can be a deadly rite of passage. Officials in California, Michigan, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island and Texas have reported deaths from such drinking binges over the last five years.

Colleges and cities have tried various tactics to stop the ritual, and now, hoping to deprive power hour of its frenzy, Texas and North Dakota are considering legislation that would declare that 21-year-olds reach the legal drinking age not at the stroke of midnight on their birthdays but seven or eight hours later in the morning.
[...]
Bradley McCue, the Michigan State University student whose parents set up the foundation after his death in 1998, had his number of shots - 24 in two hours - written on his face when police found him dead.

In a health education class of 30 prospective teachers at Minnesota State University at Moorhead, about half the students raise their hands when asked whether they have gone through a power hour. Asked how many shots, they reply 17, 15, 3, and in more than one case, "I don't remember."

Most in the class admit that power hour was hardly the first time they drank. "It was just a normal night at the bar for me, but my birthday," said Randy Backman, who turned 21 on Sept. 9, 2003, with a power hour at Coach's in Moorhead, the same bar where six months later Mr. Reinhardt did the power hour that killed him. "But there's something about 21. You look forward to it. People start asking you, 'Where are you going for your power hour?' "

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