HOW ONE UNIVERSITY STUMBLED IN ITS ATTACK ON ALCOHOL ABUSE

As Industry Resisted Change, Florida State's President Focused on
Campus Image

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Determined to shed its party-school image,
Florida State University four years ago created a coalition to curb
student alcohol abuse. The Partnership for Alcohol Responsibility
mapped an ambitious plan: outlaw "ladies drink free" nights and other
discount specials, prohibit anyone under 21 years old from entering
bars and stiffen penalties for serving underage drinkers.

The local alcohol industry, invited to cooperate, instead used its
money and political clout to persuade FSU to shun its own reform group
in favor of more-moderate efforts. Leading the charge was Susie
Busch-Transou, co-owner of the local Budweiser distributorship and
daughter of the chairman of St. Louis brewing giant Anheuser-Busch
Cos.

On the other side was Daniel Skiles, the aggressive campus
substance-abuse activist the university brought in to run the
partnership. He had the backing of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,
which frequently battles alcohol interests over college drinking policies.

In the middle was Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte, then FSU's president.
The courtly, silver-haired former state legislator wanted something
done about student drinking, but he worried about how the acrimonious
debate was affecting his school's image. What happened here in
Florida's capital shows how difficult it can be to curb student
drinking in the face of industry resistance and ambivalent academic
leadership.

Excessive student drinking wreaks a huge toll across the U.S. The
National Academy of Sciences estimated last month that underage
drinking in the U.S. costs $53 billion a year in alcohol-related
traffic accidents, violent crime and other harmful consequences. At
FSU, three students have died in alcohol-related incidents since the
partnership began its work in 1999, including a 23-year-old senior who
died Sept. 1 after a car crash. In a survey by the Harvard School of
Public Health this year, 57% of FSU undergraduates who drink said one
main reason they do so is "to get drunk."

Today, despite the efforts of its anti-abuse partnership, FSU's party
culture remains vibrant. Within two miles of the 29,000-student
school's cozy enclave of red-brick buildings and palm trees, more than
150 bars, restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores and
supermarkets sell beer, wine and hard liquor. The campus newspaper,
the FSView, recently ran a two-page spread of ads for half-priced
"fish bowls" at Yianni's, 2-for-1 mixed drinks at Po' Boys and free
margaritas for women at the Painted Lady.

Much social life revolves around alcohol. At an off-campus residence
last month, six FSU students under the legal drinking age of 21
toasted the Seminoles' football home opener with shot after shot of
rum and vodka. They drank around a makeshift tiki bar decorated with
Miller Lite flags reading, "Please Think Before You Drink." All six
were armed with fake identification for an expedition that night to
Potbelly's, another pub near campus.

One Monday in August 1999, FSU's Mr. D'Alemberte, wearing his
customary bow tie, stepped before TV cameras in downtown Tallahassee
to talk about student drinking. The university president, a nationally
known attorney and former head of the American Bar Association, was
concerned primarily that day with protecting his school's academic
reputation.

He had called the press conference to bestow a mock award -- the
"Golden Gargoyle" -- on the Princeton Review, publisher of a popular
college guide. The review had just named FSU the nation's top "party
school" for the second time in four years. Holding up a frog-like
figurine, Mr. D'Alemberte, now 70 years old, denounced the review for
using "bogus, manipulative" research. (Rob Franek, the guide's author,
defends the designation as based on interviews with 65,000 students
nationwide.)

In an interview, Mr. D'Alemberte says he wanted FSU to be seen as a
world-class institution. Its party-school reputation had hindered
efforts to lure faculty and students, he says, and even impeded
professors from obtaining research grants.

'Binge Drinkers'

Around the time of Mr. D'Alemberte's press conference, researchers at
the Harvard School of Public Health had compiled a survey that
classified 53% of FSU students as "binge drinkers." In similar
research at 119 colleges and universities nationwide, the researchers
have found the average rate to be 44%. FSU ranked in the top third of
those 119 schools. Harvard defines a binge drinker as a man who has
consumed at least five drinks in a sitting within the past two weeks,
or a woman who has consumed at least four. Harvard says that drinking
at these levels makes young people more likely to drive drunk, have
unprotected sex or otherwise get into trouble.

Mr. D'Alemberte committed FSU that fall of 1999 to doing something
serious about alcohol. The university had obtained a five-year
$700,000 grant from the Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J. With
that money, FSU formed the Partnership for Alcohol Responsibility, a
coalition of about 50 faculty members, students, civic leaders, bar
owners and others.

FSU told the foundation that the group would seek campus rule changes
and new state and local laws restricting youth drinking. The project
was part of a larger Johnson-funded program designed to test the
effectiveness of strict regulation in reducing drinking on 10 campuses
around the country.

To run FSU's partnership, the school hired Mr. Skiles, now 57, who had
worked for more than 15 years in substance-abuse programs. In earlier
work at two colleges, he says, he had become convinced that policy
changes -- for instance, state laws that have raised the drinking age
to 21 -- did more to curtail abuse than just talking about moderation.
With 85% of FSU students living off-campus, changing state and local
laws would be especially important, in his view.

The partnership's executive committee included James McDonough,
Florida's antidrug czar, and Winston Scott, a retired astronaut who
was then FSU's vice president for student affairs. The chairman was
Steve Meisburg, then a Tallahassee city commissioner. "I was very
excited," Mr. Skiles recalls. "With all of these people here, how
could we fail?"

Articulate Advocate

Another participant was Ms. Busch-Transou, vice-president of Tri-Eagle
Sales, the local Anheuser distributorship. Vivacious and articulate,
the daughter of August Busch III, the Anheuser chairman, is well known
in Tallahassee for civic and charitable activities and e-mails
peppered with exclamation points. "When I get involved in anything, I
jump in with both feet, arms, legs and eyes," she says in an
interview. Tri-Eagle, which she owns with her husband, sold more than
three million cases of beer in Tallahassee and nine surrounding
counties last year, for a 71% share of the market.

The distributorship supports boat races, chili cook-offs and other
local events with money and sometimes beer. It recently bought a
private box at Doak Campbell Stadium, where FSU's Seminoles play
football. The company donates at least $11,000 a year to the Seminole
booster club, qualifying as a "Double Golden Chief." At the state
capitol, the Anheuser logo is engraved on a plaque commemorating the
Anheuser-Busch Foundation's $1 million contribution to environmental
education and to construction of a fountain embellished with leaping
stainless-steel dolphins.

Ms. Busch-Transou, now 38, says her family has been committed to
combating abusive drinking for generations. She recalls the topic
being discussed at the dinner table when she was a child. "Anything
bad associated with our product is bad for our business," she says.
Last year, Tri-Eagle and Anheuser successfully lobbied for legislation
in Florida that toughened drunk-driving penalties and made it a felony
to manufacture fake IDs.

Anheuser requires distributors to spend at least a penny on anti-abuse
efforts for every 24-beer case. For Tri-Eagle, that amounted to about
$31,000 last year. But Ms. Busch-Transou says her company spends much
more than that to pay for numerous programs, including distribution of
booklets on talking with children about drinking. The company's
poster-size Seminole football schedule -- pinned up in bars and
restaurants around town -- advertises Tri-Eagle products and
prominently bears the slogan, "Thanks for drinking
responsibly."

'Enlightened Self-Interest'

FSU's Mr. D'Alemberte says initially he was reluctant to offer
Tri-Eagle a major role in the partnership because he assumed the
company would oppose measures that might reduce beer consumption. But
eventually he decided Ms. Busch-Transou should join the executive
committee. "I came to believe that there was an enlightened
self-interest here, that the alcohol industry could look around and
see what happened to the tobacco people," he says.

A prominent figure in Florida politics since the early 1970s, when he
served as chairman of the state House Judiciary Committee, Mr.
D'Alemberte had long experience handling knotty public-policy and
image problems. During his tenure as ABA president in the early 1990s,
he had defended the state of the American legal system against attacks
by then-Vice President Dan Quayle and others.

But Mr. Skiles and other executive-committee members thought the
diplomatic Mr. D'Alemberte was going too far to accommodate the
industry. They balked at including Ms. Busch-Transou on the committee.
"It would be like starting an antismoking campaign with Philip Morris
as a member," Mr. McDonough, the state drug-control director, recalls
saying.

Blocked from the committee, Ms. Busch-Transou nevertheless attended
most public partnership meetings, frequently challenging the group's
leaders. Some drink specials were irresponsible, she conceded, but
"happy hours" and other discounts weren't necessarily harmful. Yes,
drunks sometimes do horrible things, she said, but regulations that
punish problem drinkers and bars can unfairly punish responsible ones
as well, she said. Other local alcohol interests and the politically
powerful Florida Restaurant Association say they were glad to have the
energetic Busch family member take the lead in raising such objections.

At public meetings, the partnership's Messrs. Skiles and Meisburg
hammered on drink specials, accusing bar owners of pushing students --
especially women -- to drink more. In February 2000, Mr. Skiles
brandished a Valentine's Day bar ad that read, "No Date, Come Get
Drunk!" Ms. Busch-Transou fired back that her side didn't condone
drunkenness.

Mr. Skiles, a tall man with a soft voice who likes a cold Bud with
Mexican food, says he followed advice from the American Medical
Association, which was assisting the Johnson Foundation's effort. One
piece of advice posted on the AMA's Web site: "If you're being
effective, sooner or later the alcohol beverage industry is going to
come down on you."

A Florida State student dressed for a game last month.

Still, Mr. Skiles says he hoped public pressure and financial
self-interest would lure bar owners to the partnership's cause. The
group's activities generated plenty of media attention. In the first
six months of 2000 alone, Tallahassee TV stations and newspapers ran
more than 30 stories about drinking at FSU, some pegged to partnership
events.

Bars bear the financial burden of alcohol specials, while distributors
make the same profit whether a bar sells drinks for $5 each or a
nickel. Mr. Skiles says some proprietors told him they would gladly do
away with specials -- as long as everyone else did, too.

Charles Jaquet, 29, served 479,000 drinks last year in his four
Tallahassee bars -- about 1,300 a day -- and says he could make more
money if he and his rivals didn't offer discounts. But he won't risk
losing customers: "I've got to compete."

With fissures deepening, the industry in early 2000 formed its own
group to rival the partnership. The Responsible Hospitality Council
opposed new laws or rules in favor of enforcing existing ones. It
encouraged bars to tone down drink specials and train servers to
reject underage customers.

Then, that October, came a pivotal moment. Ms. Busch-Transou arranged
for a top Anheuser-Busch official to meet with Mr. D'Alemberte, Mr.
Skiles and other FSU officials. Sitting in Mr. D'Alemberte's
conference room, the Anheuser executive made a proposal titled, "What
Is Anheuser-Busch Prepared To Do?" The answer: fund a "social norms"
program. This approach is based on the idea that bans don't work.
Instead, social-norms programs distribute posters and other materials
that publicize surveys showing that most students drink in moderation,
if at all.

Today, scores of colleges employ such programs with funding from
Anheuser and state and federal agencies. While some schools attribute
reduced drinking to social-norms programs, skeptics cite research
finding that heavy drinking has continued at schools using the approach.

Avoiding Games

In the fall of 2000, FSU already had a federally funded $225,000
social-norms program, which the partnership supported. But Mr. Skiles
says he told Mr. D'Alemberte that Anheuser's offer to supplement it
would inevitably become an obstacle to the partnership. Mr.
D'Alemberte disagreed and eventually accepted a $457,000 grant from
Anheuser. One poster financed by the company says that 91% of FSU
students "keep themselves safe by either eating beforehand, keeping
track of the number of drinks consumed or avoiding drinking games."

At the same meeting with the Anheuser executive, Mr. D'Alemberte
surprised Mr. Skiles with another key decision: The university
wouldn't support any new state laws to limit youth drinking. His
stance seemed to contradict FSU's application for the Johnson
Foundation money, in which the school specifically embraced the goal
of pushing legislative changes. The apparent shift hobbled the
partnership's plans to lobby for bills in the Florida legislature,
including one idea to prohibit underage people from even entering
bars, Mr. Skiles says.

Mr. D'Alemberte says he thought the partnership could accomplish
plenty without pushing contentious legislation. An ace fund-raiser who
had been FSU president since 1994, Mr. D'Alemberte says he didn't want
to squander political capital at the statehouse while lobbying for
funding of other FSU projects, including a new medical school. "I
certainly know the power of the beverage industry in the legislature,"
the former state lawmaker says. He also notes that FSU already had
banned alcohol ads on campus, expanded no-alcohol student activities
and begun notifying parents when underage students received two
citations for drinking from police.

Three weeks after the Anheuser meeting, Mr. Skiles was quoted in a
Wall Street Journal article about social-norms programs saying that
FSU shouldn't accept Anheuser's money because "you end up working for
Budweiser and giving them publicity." Infuriated, Mr. D'Alemberte shot
an e-mail to Mr. Skiles's boss saying, "Dan Skiles should understand
that he cannot speak for FSU." A few days later, Ms. Busch-Transou
sent Mr. D'Alemberte a handwritten note saying she also was "very
disturbed" by Mr. Skiles's comments. From then on, Mr. Skiles says,
Mr. D'Alemberte began to distance himself from the
partnership.

A Budweiser beer display (top) at a supermarket near the Florida State
campus in Tallahassee. A large outdoor party (below) at an off-campus
student-housing complex.

The group limped ahead. By the spring of 2001, members of its
executive committee had nearly finished a strategic plan, following
through on the goals FSU had set from the beginning: ending underage
access to bars, increasing penalties for serving underage drinkers,
restricting alcohol marketing and eliminating drink specials.

The industry moved swiftly to lambaste the plan. In a 10-page letter
dated May 15, 2001, and signed by the heads of five statewide groups
representing restaurants, bar owners and alcohol distributors, it
questioned the definition of binge drinking and asserted that the
partnership's plan would raise alcohol prices. Higher prices would
punish all bars, restaurants and drinkers, not just the troublemakers,
said the letter, which Ms. Busch-Transou helped draft. Restrictions
could drive more drinking into unsupervised apartments, dorms and
fraternities, the industry said. "Problems cannot be legislated out of
existence," it asserted. "That was tried over 80 years ago with
Prohibition."

In Tallahassee, the industry enjoyed the outspoken support of John
Paul Bailey, a city commissioner. "Preaching abstinence has done
little to halt the ever-rising statistic of teenager pregnancy," he
said in his own letter on May 21 to fellow Commissioner Meisburg, the
partnership chairman. "Similarly, temperance will not work with
underage drinking."

"Tallahassee is a football town," Mr. Bailey says in an interview. "We
drink a beer before the game, one in the first quarter, one in the
second quarter -- by the third quarter, we were 'binge' drinkers."

Mr. Bailey has received financial support from alcohol interests,
including $500 from Ms. Busch-Transou and $500 from Anheuser-Busch in
2002. That year, Tri-Eagle co-hosted a $12,000 fund-raiser for his
unsuccessful mayoral run. Mr. Bailey says money from alcohol interests
was minimal and didn't influence his views.

Back on campus, there was growing unease among some FSU officials
about Mr. Skiles. He says senior administrators were particularly
upset over an MSNBC segment on campus drinking that ran nationally in
the summer of 2001. It was called "Partying 101" and focused on FSU.
"They did not like it appearing as if there was a drinking problem" at
the school, Mr. Skiles recalls.

One of those particularly distressed by such media coverage was FSU
Provost Lawrence Abele, a top aide to President D'Alemberte. He blames
Mr. Skiles for generating "inappropriate publicity" and says that the
partnership's agenda was "vaguely prohibitionist." Mr. D'Alemberte
says in retrospect that he wishes he had fired Mr. Skiles, who the
president believes had frequently misrepresented himself as a
spokesman for the entire university. Mr. D'Alemberte also says the
strategic plan set goals without any realistic plans for achieving
them.

Rather than fire Mr. Skiles, FSU told him in June 2001 that he could
no longer serve as spokesman for the partnership.

By 2002, media advocacy was nearly all that was left of the
partnership's efforts. Mr. McDonough, the Florida drug czar, resigned
from the partnership. He praises Mr. Skiles's efforts but says he was
frustrated by all of the bickering.

City Commissioner Meisburg, the partnership's chairman, drafted an
ordinance to shorten the hours of bars that tolerated underage
drinking. But without FSU backing, the measure never came to a vote.
Mr. Meisburg later stepped down as the partnership's chairman.

The partnership's last splash was an ad campaign in the spring of
2002: newspaper, billboard and TV ads showing pictures of young people
drinking or in handcuffs. The ads criticized bars for gender-based
drink specials and lax ID checking. They encouraged citizens to
contact the partnership and "get involved."

One citizen who responded was Guy Spearman III, a Florida lobbyist
whose clients include Anheuser. He called Mr. D'Alemberte, an old
friend. Mr. Spearman, an FSU alumnus who religiously attends Seminole
games and has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the
school, pointed out that the newspaper and billboard ads listed Mr.
Skiles's FSU e-mail address. "I didn't want FSU's name on the ad," he
says.

Mr. D'Alemberte says he thought some of the partnership ads
inaccurately depicted FSU as a huge drink-fest, contradicting the
Anheuser-funded social-norms campaign, which sought to convince
students that moderation prevailed on campus. He decided that the FSU
reference should be removed from the ads, and it was.

That summer, Mr. Skiles told FSU he planned to resign. He now works on
substance-abuse prevention at the nonprofit Institute for Public
Strategies in San Diego. Mr. D'Alemberte also announced plans to step
down in January 2003, a move that was unconnected to the drinking
issue. Mr. D'Alemberte says FSU fulfilled its obligations to the
Johnson Foundation, while allowing for other approaches to the
drinking problem. "We were determined to pursue the ideas that offered
the best chances for improving the situation," he says. "I regret not
making a change in the staffing much earlier so that we could move
from empty rhetoric to an effective plan."

'Clashing Philosophies'

Anheuser spokeswoman Francine Katz says the episode brought about "the
clashing of two philosophies: One advocated targeting the problem
without penalizing responsible adults; the other advocated addressing
the problem by passing laws that would restrict all drinking. In the
end, the Tallahassee community chose the first approach."

FSU officials say the school is making slow progress against drinking.
State regulators say area bars are checking IDs more carefully and
catching more fakers. The partnership, with a new director and new
chairman, is rewriting its strategic plan and providing police with
electronic ID scanners. Some bars have agreed to stop giving away
21st-birthday drinks. For the first time in 12 years, FSU failed to
make this year's Princeton Review list of the top-20 party schools.

The latest survey by Harvard's public-health school said this year
that FSU's binge-drinking rate is 55%, a sliver higher than when the
partnership started in 1999. FSU's own, less stringent survey -- it
used a standard of five beers for women, rather than four -- showed
the overall binge rate dropped to 46% this year, down from 51% in
2002. Harvard and FSU agree that the incidence of several types of
alcohol-related harm, including missed classes and hangovers, has declined.

But some students here say drinking habits haven't changed much. On a
cool Thursday night in September, five FSU students sat around a table
on the veranda at Potbelly's. Behind them, a neon Budweiser sign
glowed with the words, "We ID." Three of the students were underage,
but all were drinking, thanks to fake IDs. Even kids without phony IDs
can "get in, and people will feed you drinks," explained Michael
Graybeal, 22, a senior sociology major sipping rum and ginger ale.
"Everybody here realizes this is a party school."

The next night, Tallahassee police raided numerous off-campus parties,
part of a stepped-up enforcement effort that FSU, industry and the
partnership all support. Two underage students waited in handcuffs on
a patio strewn with abandoned Bud and Bud Light cups. "I'm so stupid,"
one said.

"Everyone drinks. Not everyone gets caught. You got caught,"
Tallahassee police officer Evan Alwine told him.

The next day, the campus rocked as the Seminole football team prepared
to play the University of Maryland. At a fraternity house on College
Avenue, parents watched as their sons played "beer pong," tossing
Ping-Pong balls into cups of beer to force opponents to chug. Nursing
an Anheuser-Busch Natural Light beer nearby was the underage student
who had declared himself "stupid" the night before. "Having a great
time," he said.