On-campus organizations like CU Don’t Know that raise awareness for the dangers of drinking serve as a small reminder for an otherwise far larger issue. Binge drinking as a phenomenon is certainly nothing new, yet its impact can be seen anywhere from media representation to bars catering to a binge-oriented clientele.
Lowering the drinking age alone won’t solve the issue of binge-drinking. Neither will less exposure in movies. Rather, we should appreciate and learn from a Latin European model which imparts, from a young age, a culturally responsible approach to alcohol and its consumption.
Culturally, alcohol is portrayed as a taboo in most North American households, which, in conjunction with higher-than-average drinking ages, generates desire stemming from alcohol’s forbidden nature. Coupled with movie depictions of heavy drinking as being the norm (“The Hangover” series and “Project X,” to name a few), a societal divide regarding attitudes to alcohol is certainly apparent. If teenagers are not exposed to alcohol by their family prior to the age at which they are “legal,” they will rely on pop culture and their peers to shaping their views concerning alcohol and its use.
However, alcohol’s presence in Latin European countries (i.e. France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal) is fundamentally different from a North American approach. In Italy, children from a very young age are surrounded by alcohol at every meal, yet this serves as a controlled environment under which they are introduced to responsible and mature drinking.
Alcohol’s role in Latin European culture also differs from that in North America: drinks are seen as an integral complement to meals, and their inclusion at the dinner table is never with the goal of getting drunk later.
The North American cultural approach to alcohol originates from Anglo-Saxon European countries. In the UK, binge drinking forms a major part of the nation’s drinking culture, with British universities experiencing much the same dilemmas as their American and Canadian counterparts regarding the best way to tackle this issue. With alcohol culturally depicted as a taboo, and higher drinking ages in Canada and the USA, the “forbidden fruit” effect is magnified to even larger proportions than what would be the case in the UK.
This ultimately leads to students going overboard due to a lack of prior education and exposure regarding alcohol, along with misconceptions as to what quantities are deemed “normal.”
Of course, the point of this isn’t to look at Latin Europe through rose-coloured glasses. Despite alcohol’s longstanding cultural presence, the impact of media depictions of the binge drinking culture in North America has seen more and more European students wanting to mimic what’s happening across the Atlantic. The point here is that cultural acceptance in Latin Europe prevents alcohol from being presented as a taboo, which eliminates this component from being exploited by marketing channels encouraging binge-drinking.
Binge drinking isn’t going to disappear anytime soon here in North America, but changing students’ perception of drinking, as CU Don’t Know are doing, is a good start. Only cultural change, in tandem with better education, can effectively engender change.
