Brand-New Alcohol Policy Has Already Failed Us
By Chris Meyer
Opinions Editor

As an upperclassman returning to campus this fall, I was greeted with several substantial changes to campus life, including the newly renovated Frary and Pearson buildings, the complete ravaging of the Academic Quad, and the loss of our beloved Greenhouse. But of all of this year’s changes, perhaps the most significant one for myself and scores of other Pomona students came in the form of the school’s newly-revised alcohol policy.

For the uninitiated, I will summarize the important parts: under the new alcohol policy, “possession or consumption of hard alcohol is viewed with special disfavor by the college. Students of any age who violate college policies while using or distributing hard alcohol will face enhanced sanctions.” This is the most severe restriction that the administration has made in recent years, and it was incorporated into the new policy in order to curtail the problematic rise of incidents involving alcohol poisoning over the last few semesters. It is perhaps a noble idea in theory, yes, but it’s also one whose validity went right out the window last weekend, when the first non-dry weekend of the year resulted in a record five cases of alcohol poisoning, four of which were from the same party.

Though unfortunate, the result should not come as altogether shocking. Although dry week has, as far as we know, cut down on the rate of incidents of alcohol-related sexual assault on campus, it still frustrates many students by forcing them to wait ten days or longer to be able to drink alcohol, resulting, in the minds of a very visible minority, in the need to binge-drink at the first possible moment, as if to make up for lost time. This kind of behavior is not the kind of thing we would like to deal with, but it is something that none of us should (or can afford to) ignore. The incident at Athearn this weekend, which ended with four students taken away in ambulances, has already proven that no matter how stringent our alcohol policy, there will always be students ready to completely ignore it and nearly get themselves killed in the process.

So where do we go from here? Given the administration’s current outlook on student alcohol use – and particularly Dean Quinley’s, who remarked last semester that if she could ban all hard alcohol on campus, she would – I wouldn’t be surprised to see them tighten the screws even further. This, however, would be a mistake. We’ll never be truly able to prevent underage students from consuming hard alcohol without constant surveillance and draconian forms of punishment for offenders. But none of us want to see Pomona College stoop to that level, so our best bet would be to move in the opposite direction. What we need in this situation is tough love, in the form of letting students pay for their own mistakes. Alcohol poisoning isn’t fun, but it is also something that can’t just randomly happen to someone – every person makes the conscious decision to begin drinking and to continue until a certain point, so if you end up in the hospital because you don’t care about your own limits or those of your friends, then I have no sympathy for you. I’ve done and seen enough drinking during my three years on campus to know that poisoning is a rare occurrence that should not happen at all, but has lately been occurring with an ever more frightening level of frequency.

Five incidents of alcohol poisoning is bad enough for one semester, but all of this happened within the first weekend of post-dry week college life; statistically, alcohol abuse leading to poisoning is already at the worst level we’ve seen in years. Though there could be many reasons for this, the administration has to realize that their new policy has more than a little to do with it. As some predicted last spring when the policy was still in the planning stages, increased sanctions aren’t eliminating such behavior; they’re simply splintering it into smaller, more erratic instances in which students drink what they have as fast as possible to avoid getting caught, and then refrain from seeking help once problems arise. The trailer party, which had been broken up by campus security, a fire truck and an ambulance by 10:00 pm, is the perfect example of an instance that nobody wanted to happen.
If the rumors are to be believed, the hosts were operating a fully-stocked bar with no less than twelve handles. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume only six handles were really available, that’s still six more than school policy allows, and more than enough to get slapped with suspension or worse (at the time of this writing, it’s still too early to tell). This strikes me as incredible for a few reasons. Nobody’s expecting to go the whole year without hard alcohol, regardless of what the administration says; I fully expect that parties this year will still have the odd handle of Smirnoff or Sav-On along with the beer. But to serve that much hard alcohol and to not even try to keep a lid on it by serving responsibly, on the first non-dry weekend of the year, when Camp Sec is expecting it most – that’s just poor form. Come on, people, we’re Pomona students, we can do better than this. If we’re going to serve hard alcohol at our parties, we can do it without getting the fire department called on us. I know we’re smarter than that. It’s just too bad when that highly visible minority I mentioned earlier does something like this — playing into the exact kind of drunken, careless stereotype that the administration was so afraid of in the first place.

But one last plea to the administration: if last weekend’s Athearn debacle has shown us nothing else, it’s that our new alcohol policy really is more harmful than not. It’d be nice to believe that if you just outlawed as much alcohol as you could, the students would stop drinking; but in the real world, this just isn’t going to fly, and the sooner we realize this, the fewer incidents like this we’ll have to suffer in the future. Instead of trying to restrict student access to alcohol, you need to condition them to behave responsibly around it — and that includes all kinds of alcohol, not just beer. Yes, some students might end up getting sick, but in the long run it’ll be beneficial for them; offenders are more likely to learn from a $900 ambulance ride than an officer confiscating their vodka.

Meanwhile, to the students: yes, the new alcohol policy harms more than it heals, but that doesn’t give you the right to spit in the administration’s face by getting all your friends drunk in the shortest time possible. None of us wanted to see your friends carted away in the ambulance on Saturday night, but responsibility needs to be taken; if you could take care of each other next time, maybe it won’t happen again, and in the future perhaps we might be able to fashion a new alcohol policy that suits everyone.