Alcohol Ban is Ignorance, not an Answer

Four universities have chosen to completely ban alcohol from Greek activities and from Greek houses. According to the Sacramento Bee newspaper, those universities include UC Berkley, the University of Oklahoma, Western Kentucky University and the University of New Mexico. Obviously, a huge prescedent has been established. If these universities were really concerned about their students then they would begin educating them about alcohol rather than living in their magical worlds and waving their magical wands of power and saying, "Poof. No more alcohol," and expecting the rest of us to think that they are responsible adults who know what they're doing.

It sounds cliche' to say, yet it's true: "If students want to drink then they will find a way to drink." This is especially true when it comes to students who have several friends or "brothers" who are of legal drinking age and can buy them alcohol. Fraternity houses that have been dry for some time now have designated "drinking locations," that are usually at another brother's house or apartment. Chapters that do allow drinking on their property will often times use these other locations for pre or post partying. Ban or no ban, students will find other places to drink.

So, all of the non-Greeks on campus are darling little angels that never drink, right? Far from the truth. This group of people is the mastermind of finding other locations to go drink. Many times they're the ones that come to your chapter parties. This group is at risk just as much as fraternity or sorority members are when they chose to consume alcohol. Universities and society for the most part just tends to overlook this group of people because they don't have the words fraternity or sorority attached to their names.

The article also indirectly says that the bans at UC Berkely come not only because of alcohol use but because of hazing. No doubt chapters that haze probably do so while they are drinking. But, let's not confuse the two. It almost seems that they are equating all drinkers to hazers and all hazers to drinkers. Chapters that haze shouldn't have to worry about drinking or not. They shouldn't have a charter anymore.

The problem with alcohol is that so many young people are constantly exposed to the glamour and sex appeal of alcohol and that so few have been educated about using alcohol safely or been exposed to the dangers of what alcohol can do to you or your friends. This is where most universities fail miserably. There are several programs that exist to educate about the dangers that exist. Campus Speak does a lot of great programs for alcohol education. What have these universities done to educate their students?

The whole idea of completely banning alcohol is nothing more than an effort to remove liability from the university and a way to ignore the problem. It is an effort to wash clean the hands of the administrations. Parents who bring their high school children to these campuses will probably immediately be told by the admissions office that the entire campus including Greek life is dry. They will be able to go back to living in their magical world where all is perfect and all problems are solved and where nobody drinks at all.

Hopefully they will be able to sleep at night knowing that they have accomplished nothing and that alcohol abuse will continue and that until they choose to educate and not ignore, deaths will still occur.