2008 Woodie Awards
Underage drinking
Part 1
Lindsay Bryant
Issue date: 5/3/07 Section: The Gold Fold
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Seventy-three: accounts for misdemeanor offenses by students cited by the University Police Department.
Twenty-two: the amount of liquor stores, 7-Elevens not included, concentrated within a two-mile radius of SJSU.
For one freshman living in Campus Village, the numbers are all too real.
Maggie Roberts has been caught twice for underage drinking in Campus Village. She is now on probation for a year and must attend alcoholism classes.
"It is just ridiculous - the effort to bust people for drinking. It's going over the top," said Roberts, a nursing student.
Though alcohol is easily accessible for SJSU students, a clear number of how many underage students are drinking and not getting caught, is no where to be found. Some students argue their consumption of alcohol is inevitable, especially those living away from their parents and on campus.
Others, such as the University Police Department, professors and local business owners, say the "over 21 law" rules the land.
"The debate of whether or not a student can handle alcohol is left to sociologists, psychologists and alcohol experts," UPD Sgt. John Laws said.
This debate draws stark differences between authority figures and students who just want to be left alone.
With 554 reported cases of students violating the university's alcohol policy in the last nine months, according to the SJSU Office of Judicial Affairs - about five violations each weekend - the incidence of students drinking is all too apparent.
Toben Nelson, an assistant professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Minnesota, discussed his research of underage binge drinking in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon.
"We continue to conduct new studies," Nelson said. " … In our general findings we have found that fewer restrictions, the cheaper the price of alcohol, the enforcement of the restrictions, all correlate with how much alcohol is consumed by minors.
"And with more drinking, it is proven there is an increase of negative effects."
As a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health College in 2001, Nelson co-authored a study about underage binge drinking and deterring factors. The study was published in the American Journal of College Health and can be accessed at http://webapps.ou.edu.
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