Nearly two and a half hours into the mandatory, pre-freshman year AlcoholEdu course, I remember questioning whether any of the information I was given would prove useful or preventative over my next four years in college. I have come to realize in the subsequent three years that if alcohol education is intended not only to promote immediate safety, but also to prevent future life difficulties for students, both high school health classes and AlcoholEdu leave much to be desired in terms of practical relevance.
It is, of course, important to be aware of certain basics of biology in the context of alcohol consumption, as many have no doubt benefitted from the conventional wisdom of alternating alcohol and water, estimating your blood-alcohol content based on your body weight and becoming familiar with the high school guidance counselor favorite, the Biphasic Curve. But this sort of “you-should-drink-less-and-here’s-why” message, which amounts to little more than one-dimensional moralization backed by fairly obvious statistics, is ineffective and perhaps irrelevant for one simple reason: College students are going to drink anyway, and some are going to drink quite a lot.
A far more relevant component of how not to ruin your life with alcohol is staying informed about the legal issues surrounding underage drinking, yet this aspect is completely absent from all conventional education on the matter. I’m speaking now not of a simple ability to regurgitate that it is illegal for a person under 21 to possess alcohol in the state of North Carolina, which is covered in AlcoholEdu, but of a knowledge of one’s rights and, more importantly, a knowledge of a police officer’s rights when it comes to enforcing the law.
It seems (at least from personal experience) that this sort of instruction would be of use to a greater number of people than would a three-hour lesson in the first-order reaction property of alcohol processing. Put simply, exactly two people I know have needed emergency medical services for alcohol-related issues, whereas the majority of people I’ve met at Duke have run into some sort of alcohol-related legal trouble. While these are by no means scientific statistics, they suggest that legal education at the very least deserves more conversation. In most, if not all, cases, students’ run-ins with the law entail heavy fines, high court costs and potentially tarnished records that could jeopardize future employment prospects— all of which could have further-reaching consequences than a few hours in the hospital.
Although Duke is a private university that can (and does) instruct its own police force to offer its students a certain level of protection from Draconian real world laws, it seems that it could do a better job of arming its students with legal knowledge for when they leave the confines of campus.
Some police officers, knowing that students are not aware of what they can and can’t legally do, take advantage of their positions to slap people with citations and fines they may not even be allowed to hand out in the first place. Is an Alcohol Law Enforcement officer allowed to stop you for any reason, search your belongings and demand an ID? It’s been known to happen, but you won’t know if it should have until you’ve paid a lawyer a few thousand dollars to find out, and your tax money has paid overtime to the officer for coming to court.
The other issue is that state alcohol laws are so abstruse and self-contradicting that even if you’ve read the statutes in their entirety, you still might not know what’s legal and what isn’t. Contrary to popular belief, for example, many states do not have laws that prohibit the consumption of alcohol by minors and persons ages 18 to 20 in private places. In other words, it’s actually legal in many states to drink (but not purchase) alcohol at someone’s home no matter what age you are. But how would anyone know that without some degree of education on the issue?
North Carolina, unfortunately, is not one of these states, but it does have its own set of mind-boggling rules, known as Chapter 18B of North Carolina’s General Statutes, from which two different readers could get opposite interpretations of just about everything.
Something is amiss when neither law enforcers nor citizens truly understand the laws that are being enforced. The prescription seems to be an increase in education on state and federal alcohol policies, which could simultaneously lead to better decision-making on the part of students and a higher level of accountability for law enforcement.
Derek Speranza is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Tuesday.
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