Students Served Mixed Messages Drinking Crackdown Doesn’T Cover Alums, Parents, Football Fans

For students living in college towns, the question of whether to drink or abstain is spiked with mixed messages.

A local grocery store displays silver and maroon cases of Coors Light with Washington State University Cougar potato chips.

Tavern advertisements in the WSU Evergreen offer 99-cent well drinks. “More on Beer, Less on Books,” reads an online bookseller’s ad citing money-saving prices in the University of Idaho Argonaut.

A new WSU study says 65 percent of WSU students have four or fewer drinks when they party. But the three 18-year-old women separately admitted to the hospital last week for alcohol detoxification certainly had more.

Despite a 1997 WSU policy prohibiting even legal-age Greeks from drinking in the public areas of their houses, alumni and Coug fans drink unchecked on game days in WSU’s fieldhouse and in the parking lots reserved for RVs.

“On the one hand, certain parts of society are telling students `Hey, you have to drink responsibly,”’ said Pullman Police officer Andy Wilson. Yet alcohol is very visible and accessible, he said.

It’s not difficult to see that drinking is still a popular pastime. Though less visible, the toga parties and pub crawls still happen. And so do the accidents.

Already this school year, one student who had been drinking was critically injured when he fell five floors from a balcony. Several others were injured when a party house’s rotting balcony collapsed under the weight of people attending a kegger.

It’s nothing new. But what has changed is the response drinking elicits from university officials, alumni, parents and the media.

“Drinking still exists, but society has less tolerance,” said Moscow police Capt. Cameron Hershaw, a longtime resident of the Palouse. “The standard and the test has changed.”

As baby boomers prepare to trot their children off to college, public concern over student drinking has increased.

“What was good for us is not good for our children,” explained Bruce Pitman, dean of students at nearby University of Idaho. “The parents have had experiences that they don’t want their children to have.”

Neither the UI nor WSU aims for a completely dry campus (both allow students of legal drinking age to drink in their private rooms on campus). But both schools are embarking on major educational efforts to raise awareness about responsible alcohol use. When students sense a double standard, however, those efforts often fall on deaf ears.

“They’re telling us not to have fun but college kids are going to drink,” said WSU student Nick Hansen, a member of Alpha Tau Omega. “The same alums that are cracking down on us did the same thing.”

Many students feel they’re being robbed of a traditional college rite of passage.

“I’ve heard the stories from when my brothers and sisters were here and this is nothing,” said a graduate student, 25, who was buying cases of Busch Light Friday afternoon after downing four pitchers of beer at Shaker’s, a Greek Row bar. He asked not to be identified.

Merchants say Mom’s Weekend is one of the biggest consumption weekends all year. And university officials, ever cautious about upsetting alumni and donors, are hesitant to apply strict alcohol restrictions to adult tailgaters on campus. As police ticketed students drinking on Greek Row and on North College Hill (both off-campus), visitors openly consumed bottles of wine and beer in campus parking lots reserved for RVs.

Before and after the game in Martin Stadium on Saturday, Coug fans drank WSU-sponsored beer, wine and hard liquor served in the fieldhouse.

WSU President Sam Smith insists binge drinking is not just a university problem but a societal problem to be combatted with community partnerships. Yet at WSU, Project Culture Change only applies to students, who feel increasingly resentful about the crackdown.

“I’m frustrated. People are getting in trouble,” said Daria Toth of Spokane, who was getting ready to go out with a sorority sister Friday. “I think it’s safer to party in a frat than drive somewhere.”

Students do follow the parties. A carload of 10 dorm residents crammed into a sedan Friday to drive to Campus Commons North, a large off-campus apartment complex with a party reputation. Three sat in the front, six in the back and one unlucky fellow rode in the trunk.

The more-stringent Greek Row alcohol policy isn’t the only factor contributing to the party shift to other venues. From 1993 to 1998, 1,278 new multi- and single-family units were built in Pullman, adding more private student housing. Pullman police Officer Scott Patrick, who patrols College Hill from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., compares it to the carnival gopher game where you whack a gopher in one place and it pops up somewhere else.

“We’re just displacing it,” Patrick said.

Regulating one problem can create another. When police started a keg registration system to track where beer was being consumed, keg sales dropped dramatically. But students weren’t drinking less.

“The volume is the same,” said Todd Kurly, manager of Frontier Distributors in Pullman. “Beer sales have been flat the last several years, But there’s been a shift from kegs to packages.”

Dissmore’s grocery store, now owned by Tidyman’s, will even sell pallets of Busch beer for $800. Unlike kegs, packaged beer doesn’t have to be registered. As the school year started, some large retailers dropped prices for Busch beer to under $8 a case.

Smaller house gatherings are more manageable for police. But thefts and burglaries increase as more students open their doors to strangers. Neighborhoods that rarely experienced problems before, such as Military Hill, now have noise disturbances as parties have encroached. And weak enforcement of the tougher alcohol policy contributes to a growing sense among students that they are “getting away” with drinking, Patrick said.

Police forward multiple alcohol violations to WSU officials, but only a percentage of those result in sanctions, partly because it’s peers who decide guilt. From some students’ perspective, shifting the parties off Greek Row encourages drunken driving and other irresponsible behavior.

“When it’s pushed under the table people will be more sneaky and end up doing more dangerous stuff,” said Tiki Buechler, 19, of the Tri-Cities.

WSU students are also frustrated that even though similar activity goes on at other colleges, they get labeled a party school because student behavior is more visible in such a small town.

“These kids are not a bunch of damn alcoholic irresponsible people. That’s bull,” said Bob Enslow, who operates the Corner Market grocery daily from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. on Greek Row.

With a barrage of media scrutiny behind them and Labor Day weekend upon them, many students left town. Those who stayed remained relatively quiet. But even a slow night would make the average parent cringe.

At Campus Commons North, a few partygoers threw up over their apartment railings. Others dropped bottles from their second-floor balconies, raising their arms in celebration as the bottles smashed to pieces.

Two young women - one of them crying - cursed police as they made their way through the broken glass toward the parking lot. “We got mipped,” whined one, referring to the minor-in-possession citations issued to underage drinkers.

Devon Brown, 19, also received an MIP. She and two other friends drove to Pullman from the Tri-Cities for weekend parties.

It’s a growing trend.

“A lot of the problems we’re running into aren’t students, they are people coming into our town to visit,” Patrick said.

“Forget Tri-Cities,” said 18-year-old Ryan Pofahl, who was lingering in Campus Commons North with what he said was his 10th Coors Light of the evening. “You can come up here and party and not worry about getting in trouble.”