Approach To Alcohol

More and more we are understanding that the solutions to complex health care situations involve working closely with clinicians, the community, and academics. The best solutions for minimizing the negative impact of substance and alcohol abuse involve this kind of approach.

Community Driven Approach

There is a JAMA reference that notes incredible improvements when interventions are applied in a community-wide intervention in 3 communities of 100,000 in Northern and Southern California and South Carolina http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v284n18/rfull/joc90970.html

Traffic data revealed that, in the intervention vs comparison communities, nighttime injury crashes declined by 10% and crashes in which the driver had been drinking declined by 6%. Assault injuries observed in emergency departments declined by 43% in the intervention communities vs the comparison communities, and all hospitalized assault injuries declined by 2%.

College More Dangerous Than Vietnam

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death... I was reflecting on these words in Psalms 23 and recalled a recent statistic about college alcohol use. Each year alcohol alone kills more than 1700 students a year age 18 - 24 who are in college. Over 50,000 died in Vietnam but divided by the number of years of the conflict, about the same number per year comes up. We are losing college students to alcohol-related death at a rate approaching the monthly losses of US servicemen during the Viet Nam conflict. The impact of those lost and injured is even more significant in terms of costs, disability, and disruptions. Colleges have begun a national effort to reduce these losses. http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/students/alcoholfacts/
 

Points to Ponder:

College students spend about $6 billion each year on alcohol
The average male student spends over $300 each year on alcohol
The average female student spends over $150 each year on alcohol
Around 3% of current college students will die of an alcohol-related death in the future
35% of college failures can be attributed to alcohol
Alcohol factors in to 85% of campus rapes
Over half of all on-campus crime is associated with alcohol
One in three suicides by college students is done under the influence of alcohol
One in three college students do not drink at all
Most college students drink responsibly
http://www.gwu.edu/~cade/alcohol2.htm
 

Why don't college students protest the deaths of their own on college campuses as much or more when compared to generations past college students protesting a war that was far away and unlikely to involved them directly?

Where is our Kent State event or perhaps better yet is why don't we use each of these deaths as mini-Kent States?

Have our college campuses become so separated from the rest of the country that we do nothing or that they do nothing to help each other?

Why do we allow our students of all ages free access to "entertainment" that promotes such behavior through commercials, spring break specials, and regular TV shows? Does our right to entertainment supercede the right of our children to live or to live relatively unimpaired for longer periods of time?

Are our journalists so tied to the entertainment and marketing industries that they do not see such deadly trends?

Those who are injured are even more numerous and their stories are often far more tragic. Their situation is also a great concern for a nation spending increasing billions on health and long term care.

We have invested much in these children in terms of love, teaching, time, and money. These are our future leaders. They are dying and taking others with them.

These are our children. Why don't we care for them?

Robert C. Bowman, M.D. Family Physician

Some have questioned the initial results as being influenced by Mothers Against Drunk Driving so I reviewed the following and did some calculations based on Oklahoma data (below)

1. SURVEY SHOWS RESULTS OF COLLEGE STUDENT DRINKING

Drinking by college students ages 18-24 contributes to about 1,400 student deaths, 500,000 injuries, and 70,000 cases of sexual assault or date rape each year, according to a study supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Study results were released April 9. Visit (http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/Media/ ) for materials including a news release on the study and information on National Alcohol Screening Day on April 11. An AAFP patient education handout on alcohol abuse is available at (http://familydoctor.org/healthfacts/006/ ).

The comprehensive report and recommendations are at http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cas/Documents/trends/Trends.pdf

http://chronicle.com/free/almanac/2001/nation/nation.htm

29 million in all types of colleges enrolled at all ages

CRIMES ON 6,269 CAMPUSES  http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i21/21a03201.htm#crimes