STUDY OF U. OF NORTH CAROLINA STUDENTS SUGGESTS THAT MOST DON'T DRINK

A new study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- in which
researchers administered Breathalyzer tests to randomly selected students
who were returning late at night to their dormitories, fraternity and
sorority houses, and off-campus apartments -- suggests that reports of
rampant collegiate drinking may be exaggerated.

Seventy-two per cent of the students tested had a blood-alcohol
concentration of 0.00, according to the study by the university's Highway
Safety Research Center. Even on the traditional party nights of Thursday,
46riday, and Saturday, 66 per cent of the students had no detectable trace
of alcohol in their blood; on other nights, the proportion of students with
no alcohol was 86 per cent.

The study was conducted in October and November 1997, on all nights of the
week. Researchers from the center interviewed 1,846 students between 10
p.m. and 3 a.m. in front of residence halls, fraternity and sorority
houses, and off-campus apartment complexes with large student populations.
Of those, 1,790 students agreed to a Breathalyzer test.

The $350,000 study was paid for by the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration and the North Carolina Governor's Highway Safety Program.

Rob Foss, manager of alcohol studies for the research center and a
co-director of the project, said that the findings showed that college
students were not the heavy drinkers that other studies made them out to be.

"Yes, most U.N.C. students drink. But they don't drink most of the time,
and they certainly don't get drunk most of the time," he said. "They simply
don't drink nearly as much as everyone seems to think they do."

Much of that perception, he said, comes from surveys in which students are
asked to report on their own drinking behavior. That type of research is
limited, he said, because people sometimes cannot remember how much they
have had to drink, quantify how much alcohol is in their drink or in their
bloodstream, or know at what point they become impaired. "Just because
people are answering a question doesn't mean they're giving you good
information," Mr. Foss said.

"I think you'll find that on any campus anywhere, if you look at the
alcohol in the systems of students, it doesn't look nearly as bad as
self-reported data suggest," he said.

Henry Wechsler, director of College Alcohol Studies at the Harvard
University School of Public Health, questioned the methodology of the North
Carolina study and said that the researchers were "jumping to an
unwarranted conclusion" by indicating that the data from one campus could
be used to paint a picture of student drinking on a national level.

Mr. Wechsler led broad studies of collegiate alcohol use in 1993 and 1997,
basing his conclusions on questionnaires filled out by thousands of
students at 116 institutions. Those studies looked at the number of
students who had gone on a drinking binge at least once over a two-week
period. Binge drinking was defined as consuming five or more drinks in a
sitting for men and four or more for women.

Of the North Carolina study, Mr. Wechsler said: "If they're trying to make
the point that students don't drink all the time and that [not all
students] drink, they're absolutely correct. Nobody is mentioning what
percentage of the time that students drink or get drunk. I don't know of
any study that has made that statement; mine certainly hasn't."

"To catch some people at a given moment of time with alcohol on their
breaths is an entirely different method and can't be compared to ours," Mr.
Wechsler said. "They can't talk about a student's experience over two weeks
or a month or a school year. And they're not studying people, they're
sampling Breathalyzer readings."

Plus, he said, "I wouldn't be standing outside of fraternity houses. I
would be measuring alcohol levels from inside."

The University of North Carolina is using the research findings as part of
a new campaign -- called "2 out of 3, .00 B.A.C." -- that will use posters,
placards, and stickers to deter binge drinking among incoming freshmen by
dispelling the notion that most students are heavy drinkers.

Susan Kitchen, vice-chancellor for student affairs at Chapel Hill, said she
hoped the campaign would "reassure impressionable first-year students --
who just left their homes and are eagerly seeking a new family on campus --
that they don't have to drink alcohol to find their niche here, because
most of their classmates don't drink much, or at all, either."