Drugs, Booze, and Sex

~ Laura

My first beat as a campus reporter in college was the police blotter. Every week, I visited the campus security office, went over the list of incidents, and wrote up the funniest cases for the newspaper. Usually, it involved a dim witted stoner getting caught with a doobie in a public area or a kid who was found passed out on the lawn after a night of jello shots in a dorm room party. The only disturbing items on the list were the suicides and suicide attempts. I was not allowed to report on those.

All in all, it was pretty mild stuff. If my kid was entering the college of my youth, I would have very few concerns. I would tell him to avoid funnels and jello shots and doobies in the college commons, but I wouldn’t be terribly alarmed. Are things very different today?

This morning, my first reads were about sexual assaults on college campuses and the heroin epidemic in New Jersey. Is this activity by a few outliers that has been blown up a sensationalist media or should I really be freaked out?

Published by Laura

20 thoughts on “Drugs, Booze, and Sex”

  1. This is more high school than college, but what scares me looking back is all the drinking and driving. So much drinking and driving.

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  2. If you look for a net effect on human life, I suppose the alcohol-related teen pregnancies outnumbered the alcohol-related car accident deaths and suicides, but on the whole maybe there were healthier ways to live.

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  3. and wrote up the funniest cases for the newspaper…

    No public masturbation? Those seemed to be the “funny” ones that I’d see getting written up.

    As for the other questions, I’d be shocked if the sexual assault situation isn’t _better_ now, for anyone except those engaging in sexual assault. I thing there is very good reason to think the “uptick” is completely an artifact of doing somewhat more to actually enforce existing laws, rather than just ignoring them. And, I really doubt that the heroin problem is a big one on college. It’s not the right crowd. So, you still have more to fear from the jello shots and the like.

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    1. As I recall, there’s always a pervert in the stacks.

      Come to think of it, the metamorphosis of libraries into coffee shops may have made them less fun for perverts.

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  5. My working hypothesis, always, is that media infatuations change much more rapidly than the underlying reality. So my guess would be that student sexual behavior on college (including, though hardly limited to, sexual assault) is not too different from what it was when Laura, or I, was in college. I note that most of the alarming statistics that are sometimes published require counting as sexual assaults things that never appeared in a police blotter. As to heroin, or any other drug, what Matt said.

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  6. I do not things are worse than when I was in school. I think awareness of sexual assault is way up, and have no fears that my kids are more likely to get assaulted than the girls of my day. I think assault and unwise, alcohol fueled choices are always a problem but I feel more comfortable discussing those issues than my own parents did (they made the assumption that they wouldn’t be a problem, and, I was lucky, they weren’t).

    I think we lived in a pretty drug fueled age, too, so I don’t think that’s worse.

    Not sure what I think about heroin — I do think that heroin is more of a problem than it was in the 80’s (though, we had crack and cocaine, though those may be less of an overdose hazard, they were certainly a public health problem). I do think there’s something going on there — the view that prescription opiate use changed in the 2000’s, and contributed to opiate absent seems plausible. I don’t know, though, how I’d expect the issue to affect the HS/college age.

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  7. What do the stats show on drinking and driving, in teens? I feel like rates of drunken driving have gone down among a large swathe of the population (though rural communities might still be an exception). I think driving under the influence was fairly common in the old days, but that attention and legal consequences and opprobrium have changed behavior among adults. And, among kids with futures (i.e. higher SES college bound kids), the consequences in comparison to their hopes seem significant enough that I’d expect behavior to change for those who aren’t actually addicted to alcohol (aided by the new brand of parenting where drinking isn’t as bad as not having the choices hoped for in college, so, kids can call parents for the ride, rather than hiding by driving themselves).

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  8. Heroin policy is the front page of the county paper today…. http://www.northjersey.com/news/vermont-plan-to-fight-heroin-scourge-a-stark-contrast-to-n-j-s-1.1013967

    Steve and Jonah went to a confirmation retreat on Saturday. The head of the youth ministry said that he had been to the hospital six times in the past six weeks to help families in the town who had reached out to him for help. We’re in a mostly UMC community. I think heroin is hitting the college bound kids, too.

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  10. Forgive multiple posts–I’ve found more than one link in a reply leads to replies disappearing.

    We’ve had heroin-related deaths, and teen criminal behavior in the area. Off the cuff, I would have said that it was worse than in the 80s. I suspect it’s hard to be a student and a heroin addict at the same time, so those who develop habits in high school may not make it to college, or drop out soon after arriving.

    BUT, searching online for facts, I found CDC resources which document the enormous problem with prescribed opiates. http://www.cdc.gov/cdcgrandrounds/pdf/phgrrx17feb2011.pdf

    The slides are worth reading.

    I had read news accounts of pill mills, and such, but the scale and scope of the problem is astounding.

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      1. http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2012SummNatFindDetTables/NationalFindings/NSDUHresults2012.htm#ch2.16

        Very detailed report. Figure 2.1 puts things into perspective. 0.3 million past month users age 12 or older of heroin.

        6.8 million past month users age 12 or older of “psychotherapeutics.” (pain relievers, stimulants, sedatives and tranquilizers.)

        I’d also worry about hallucinogen use among college students.

        It could be that people hooked on prescription drugs turn to heroin to satisfy their addiction. That is, they didn’t progress from marijuana to cocaine to heroin. They progressed from painkillers prescribed for an overuse injury to heroin.

        Are the cross-state drug registries functioning now? It could be that people who used to deceive multiple doctors in an attempt to get painkillers have been cut off of the extra supply.

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    2. http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/mtf-vol2_2012.pdf#page400

      Last link to online sources!

      This volume covers college students, and adults 19-50. Very detailed, with survey responses tabulated in graphs going back to 1970s.

      The graph on page 377 shows that college students are generally less likely to use illicit drugs than their age peers, with some strange exceptions. College aged men are more likely to try hallucinogens. College aged women less likely than their age peers, except MDMA. Not so strange exception, both genders are more likely than their peers to have used amphetamines, which includes drugs such as ritalin and adderall.

      They drink more. College students are more likely to attend college parties than their age mates.

      ****

      Newspapers here are reporting a sudden increase in heroin deaths. It could be so new that it hasn’t reached national drug abuse monitoring reports yet.

      Or, many of the overdose deaths in middle aged people look like heart attacks, rather than overdoses, because they take pills rather than snorting or injectings stuff?

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  11. Heroin has hit Minnesota hard, as in many other parts of the country. In 2013, 98 people died in the state died due to heroin-related incidents, according to preliminary figures from the state health department. And the number of people entering heroin treatment programs has increased tenfold over the last 20 years, according to other state data.

    http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/258325231.html

    http://www.startribune.com/local/west/231241191.html

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  12. Thinking of Toronto’s illustrious mayor here as an example….with the drug trade being so huge (billions), I suspect that there are more middle class and up folk who are recreational users. Homeless people don’t have that much money for drugs.

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    1. Sure. Homeless people spend more money to try to look presentable to the public than Mayor Ford does.

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