It’s 9 p.m. on Tuesday, and Senior Judy Smith (not her real name) knocks over a bottle of red wine, breaking the glass into small pieces on her granite countertop. Within seconds, she lays a paper towel onto the spill before wringing it out over a red-plastic cup.
“The quicker picker up, Bounty,” Smith sings while sipping the spilled wine, her fifth drink of the evening — a common number for her.
At 20 drinks a week, Smith consumes more alcohol than 98 percent of American women, according to the alcohol prevention website AlcoholScreening.org. She doesn’t see her drinking as a problem, but rather a norm.
“It sounds stupid and clichéd,” Smith said, “but everybody does it. It is the lifestyle of college students to drink. It’s instilled in their mind. Everyone from Hollywood to your older brother lets you know that that’s what you do at college. You go to frat parties and get wasted.”
Smith is a 22-year-old senior in the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU, and if that’s her idea of college life, she’s got plenty of company.
The Surgeon General’s office says that every year about 5,000 people under the age of 21 die from alcohol-related causes. Locally, drugs and alcohol cut short the lives of three Mustang students two years ago.
To help cut down this number, the University formed the Task Force on Substance Abuse Prevention. In October that group pushed nine university policy changes regarding drugs and alcohol.
The task force characterized SMU drinkers like Smith as wealthy students without jobs who have plenty of spare time to drink since their classes are not hard enough. In her case, they were partly right.
Smith lives by herself in a $300,000 plus town home. Her father is in the oil business and her best friends and drinking buddies have parents who are CEOs, plastic surgeons and head corporate attorneys. Smith says she spends upwards of $100 a week on alcohol.
She does have a job, though. It’s an internship, and one that is top in her field for the Dallas area. The reason she got the gig is because Smith carries a 3.7 GPA that she says is a result of hard work, not easy classes.
“I just make sure to buckle down and do my homework before going out,” she said.
Smith started drinking in high school, “like most other students., by stealing from my parents’ liquor cabinet.” But it wasn’t until she got to SMU that her habits formed.
“All of my friends kept wanting to go out dancing, but I was so nervous and hated it. That is until I found Jack Daniels,” she said. “It makes the level of fun just increase tremendously. I’ve been at it ever since.”
Smith’s friend Amanda doesn’t see it the same way.
“You can have fun in college, but you can be responsible,” Amanda said. “When it gets to a point where you can barely stand up, that I’ve seen her reach, then that isn’t fun.”
As Smith pops the cork on a bottle of Champagne and pours her sixth drink of the night, she denies that she is ever out of control and says that she “can’t think of anything bad that has ever happened because of drinking.”
But by the time the 120-pound woman reaches her seventh drink, Smith admits to frequent blackouts, or memory lapses. Including a time when she woke up in a stranger’s bed without knowing how she got there.
“All of these are hours and hours of my life that I’ll never get back. I’ll never remember. I’ll never get to enjoy,” Smith said.
But John Sanger, the head of alcohol and drug prevention at SMU, said the blackouts aren’t the worst thing that could happen. Smith’s level of drinking, he says, could damage her memory, lead to risky sexual behavior, have long term health implications, destroy her relationships with friends and family and possibly lead to death.
Smith admits to a few close calls with alcohol poisoning, but she can’t go into details since she was blacked out at the time. All she knows is, “I lived.”
“It has gotten to that point. I mean a handful of times in college, four years, bound to happen,” she said.
As a prime example of someone the Substance Abuse Task Force policy changes are trying to help, Smith weighed in on them.
The major idea coming from the task force was academic related. They wanted harder classes, required attendance, and more Friday courses. Smith says this semester is her first Friday course in two years, “and it blows. I can only do a half day at my internship now.”
Smith says she still goes out on Thursdays, despite the class. “There’s no way I’d miss that. Thursdays are when you see everyone.”
As far as classes being harder – “I might have one or two more quizzes now. It’s not that different.”
Another major Task Force change is the Dean of Students Caring Community Connections program. The idea is that if a teacher suspects a student is having trouble they can refer the student to the Dean for evaluation. A teacher has never approached Smith about her drinking. And Smith has never received an alcohol violation from SMU, so that means several other major policy changes have not affected her, such as parent notification or stronger partnerships with local law enforcement agencies.
One that has had a direct connection has been more late-night options. In order to cut down on the culture of bar hoping, the Task Force wanted to see more on-campus, non-alcohol related late night entertainment options. Yesterday, the Student Organizations office announced a new source of funding for programs hosted on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday or Saturday after 10 p.m. called Evening Programs and Initiatives Contribution. Smith says she’s gone to one of these late night programs.
“It was one of the free movie screenings at like midnight,” she said. “I really liked it … [but] my friend and I took water bottles full of wine inside the theater for the show.”
The last major policy change is adding a medical amnesty and good Samaritan policy, meaning that if two friends are drinking and one is suffering from alcohol poisoning, then the other can call for help without fearing getting in trouble.
“That’s just common sense,” Smith says. “It never happened to me, but a lot of my friends have told me that they’ve not called for help because they didn’t want to get into trouble. This could really save lives.”
As for her overall opinion of the task force changes, “Okay. Nothing groundbreaking that will make all college students stop drinking. But it’s got a few decent items.”
What will make all college students stop drinking, at least as much? Smith is not sure. But for herself:
“When I went out to the bar, I was kissing a guy and tasted a piece of paper in my teeth, I guess from the towel,” Smith said. “It was then that I knew I should cut back. Way back. At least for that night.”
