BOOZE: 'PERHAPS WE SHOULD START BEING HONEST ABOUT IT, TOO'

When I went off to boarding school my physician father said, "Except for
food, don't put anything into your mouth that isn't given to you by a
doctor." The advice helped make that teen-ager a non-smoker. In college, it
helped him avoid the peyote, mescalin, and marijuana that in the early
Sixties were beginning to worm their way into the collegiate - and national
- - culture.

It did not help with alcohol. Fraternity drink-ing bouts still are the
stuff of legend, and even now a drink or two goes down rather nicely. This
rare bit of personal history is set down here to inform the reader, prior
to what follows, that the writer is not a total prig.

For the hour is at hand to talk about booze. It is insidiously everywhere.
It's the elephant in the living room that most insistently refuse to notice.

YES, IT HAS been around for millennia. Yes, alcoholic merriment was rooted
on college campuses at least as far back as the 12th Century, when a bunch
of Oxford divinity students composed one of the most enduring drinking
songs, "Gaudeamus Igitur." Yes, drinking was so bad on UVa's campus,
causing student riots, that in the 1820s founder Thomas Jefferson urged
that alcohol and other "vicious irregularities" be banned.

Still, the impression - how to quantify it even in this age of
quantification? - is that alcohol infuses this society to an extent rarely
seen. Advertising glorifies it. Without it most parties bomb. The shelves
of wineshops spill over with bottles from around the globe, and beer stores
are not far behind. (Never mind the divine aroma; never mind the unique
blend of barley and hops: We're talking here about variant flavors of an
addictive drug.)

With not much success, colleges across the land struggle to deal with the
drinking "rite of passage." The latest effort is "social-norm marketing,"
extensively funded by brewers and others. Colleges having given up on
trying to convince students that drinking can be dangerous, this is the
nifty notion that pushing the health benefits of moderation (ah yes:
"drinking, the healthy choice") is far better than employing the scare
tactics of abstinence - which suggests nothing quite so much as that the
game is over.

And now the news columns and rumor mills are full of stories about the
things high-schoolers and middle-schoolers are doing as a consequence of
alcohol - to others and to themselves. Even as the experiments in
combatting this scourge proliferate, the ages of those using alcohol descend.

LOOK AT the numbers.

Remember the campaigns to combat "binge drinking" on campus? A major study
has found that on an average day four college students die in accidents
involving alcohol. An additional 1,370 suffer injuries tied to drinking,
and 192 are raped by their dates or sexually assaulted after drinking.

In the culture at large, let's see: According to the Justice Department,
alcohol is a factor in one-fourth of aggravated assaults, one-third of sex
crimes, one-half of homicides, and two-thirds of domestic violence cases.
And there are those staggering numbers about the role of booze in highway
maimings and deaths.

So as everybody knows, alcohol liberates anger. It promotes stupid
behavior. It prevents learning. It drives its abusers down. It shreds
emotions, it wounds, and it kills.

Yet we look the other way, give it a wink and a nod, tell ourselves we are
immune to its effects, pretend it is not there or is not a problem, dismiss
how it plays out in riots as "racial tension" or "mob psychology" or
"inadequate law enforcement," and respond to its spreading use
ineffectually - or not at all.

And abjectly grateful parents say of their drinking children, "At least
they're not on drugs."

ANYONE WITH a sure-fire remedy would lead the charts as the planet's
richest individual.

"Responsible drinking" may be almost as much an oxymoron as "responsible
premarital (or non-marital) sex." In this country, the only way may be
raising the drinking age to, say, 25 - which of course never is going to
happen - and getting stricter with punishments (as we should with even
initial drug use).

This is hardly an appeal for what Winston Churchill called - as he famously
could - "intemperate self-restraint." Yet without a massive cultural
change, which isn't going to happen either, it seems the nation's drinking
problem is destined to grow worse. And we are to wince at its consequences
and to read periodic observations such as these from two women - the first
a Yale sophomore, the second the lately late author (Caroline Knapp) of
Drinking: A Love Story.

(1)"A large number of undergraduates at Yale are alcoholics . . . .I always
have to laugh when my parents ask if anyone 'binge drinks' at Yale, because
there isn't any other kind of drinking here. A good number of people start
drinking around 9 p.m. and just keep going until they throw up, pass out,
run out of alcohol, or manage to make it back to their room with the object
of their desires, at which point they are usually too drunk even to get
their clothes off."

(2)"Tobacco has been vilified in this culture. The war on drugs is waged on
illegal narcotics: crack, heroin, cocaine. Ecstasy is now enjoying its
place in the spotlight, the social ill du jour. Alcohol, meanwhile, is
abused by some 14 million Americans and contributes to the deaths of
100,000 each year. Our culture bottles it, buys it, uses it, glamorizes it,
needs it. Perhaps we should start being honest about it, too."