We come into college with our brains still developing. As much as colleges are about training the youth of the nation to carry the torch in the future, they also harbor an inordinate amount of drinking. Students often come into their first year with the notion that drinking is an integral part of their college experience. This is especially true at USC since parties on Frat Row and off-campus housing dominate the social life from Thursday night to Saturday night every single week. The prospect of engaging in this "marathon" of nightly drinking is routinely shrugged off as a commonality.
The issue with this many opportunities to drink in a very uncontrolled environment is that it can promote dangerous drinking behavior, eventually developing into alcohol abuse. The Daily Trojan featured an op-ed piece recently about this very problem and offered one statistic from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "The Institute reported that about 20 percent of college students meet the criteria for an alcohol use disorder (AUD), according to a 2008 study." Considering that Niche recently named USC as the second top party school in California and Playboy Magazine claiming it fifth in the country in 2012 and 2013, no stretch of the imagination is required to believe that 20 percent of USC students could exhibit AUD behavior.
Another issue with these disorders is how difficult it can be to detect such a problem since social drinking here promotes binge-drinking and other unhealthy drinking habits. In a party setting, a conscious social drinker and an alcohol-dependent are so hard to tell apart. USC's health department encourages any students who believe they have a problem to come to them for assistance. The flaw with this is that many students probably don't know they have this issue as their drinking behavior is encouraged and cheered for at social drinking events. The Daily Trojan went on to state that, "Currently, the University is not doing enough." This made clear to me the environment I find myself in, and I feel it necessary to spread this truth and encourage a redefining of the social environment at USC. I fear that I may have met people who drink out of habit instead of an occasional social desire, and I cannot stand to have their life risked unknowingly.
