On the Drinking Question

Today is my 21st birthday (no fooling). This afternoon you may find me at the Pro, carefully exercising my new purchasing power. Tonight you may find me at the Bow, checking to see just how accurate that "Harvard bar" was in "Good Will Hunting." (Or you may find me in Lamont doing tutorial reading, but that's another story.)

Two years ago, I might well have predicted that today would be the first day I would drink. When I came to Harvard I had never had an alcoholic drink outside of family celebrations. There was plenty of drinking at my high school, I'm sure, but somehow I was naive enough to ignore that fact until prom night, when, on a letter-strewn beach, I found my classmates eagerly guzzling beverages I had never heard of. When I arrived at Harvard that September, getting smashed was not on my list of goals. I don't think I even thought about alcohol until the first entryway meeting.

At that meeting, however, my eyes would be opened to the wide world of college drinking. My proctor--who would prove to be self-absorbed and irrelevant to my life--basically said to us, "Look, this is college. I know you are going to drink, but it's against the rules. So, here's the deal: as long as I don't know about it, it's okay. Just don't make me have to enforce the rules." At the time I didn't think much of it. But in retrospect, that comment, coming from someone I then took to be a respectable authority figure, led me to assume that everyone would be drinking and that it was an acceptable and accepted practice.

Despite this rude awakening, I remained a resolute teetotaler my first year. I remember going to parties and leaving just because everyone was drinking. I remember my great disappointment when I discovered that friends had acquired fake IDs.

The pressure to drink began to wear me down during sophomore year. I started picking up a beer at parties and even figuring out how to operate the tap on the keg after a while. Yet I remained torn. That November, the night after The Game, I walked down Mt. Auburn Street shaking my head at the beer-induced chaos around me--the vomit on the street, the police cars everywhere, the bodies collapsing onto one another as they fell out of the final clubs. I was still reluctant to be a part of that scene.

I struggled with the drinking question for a long while. On the one hand, I felt compelled by my respect for the law and a sizable degree of prudishness to refrain. I was proud to refuse to give in to what everyone else was doing, to what I considered wrong or at least unhealthy. Yet at the same time, my abstention was isolating, especially as I began putting myself in situations in which alcohol was readily available. This year I finally gave in. I stopped castigating others for having fake IDs, though I never did come close to getting one. I started wondering how I could have wasted so much mental energy condemning my peers for drinking underage. I began to develop favorite beers and mixed drinks, despite being just 20. I even came close to getting drunk. (Don't laugh.)

What happened? In part, I began to get over my trepidation and to realize that alcohol is not a demon in a bottle. Drinking in moderation, I finally conceded, won't change your life or make you an addict or a bad person.

I also used to justify not drinking on grounds of hypocrisy, given that I believed (and still do believe) that 21 is the proper drinking age--it encourages us to think twice before drinking at a young age and, studies show, it cuts drunk driving deaths. But hypocrisy began to seem like a smokescreen, given my propensity to jay-walk and speed without hesitation.

Finally, what most kept me from drinking was the fear that I would be caught red-handed by the Harvard Police. After a while, however, it dawned on me that for better or worse, the percentage of students reported for drinking underage on campus is and will likely remain ridiculously minute.

Still, I wonder how much I actually decided to start drinking. The fact is that those of us who, for whatever reason, need time to decide whether to drink while underage are too often not given that time. Instead, we quickly see that to "fit in" at Harvard, we need to drink, at least a bit. If we don't, we risk being ostracized and laughed at, scorned and ignored. This need not be the case. The received wisdom should be this: "Drinking is not necessary to have fun or to enjoy college. If you do decide to drink, drink responsibly and respect the choice of others not to."

Why is this not the message I heard as an 18-, 19- and 20-year-old at Harvard? Why does drinking seem the given on this campus? At least two parties are to blame: the College and undergrads themselves.

First, proctors and tutors must change their approach to the issue of drinking. Rather than implying that everyone drinks, they should send the message that drinking is not essential at Harvard and that to abstain is a worthy choice. Likewise, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 must realize that formal statements about the risks of drinking do little more than imply that the College expects us to drink; for those of us on the impressionable edge, an anti-drinking message, delivered loud and clear, could be persuasive.

Yet undergrads are perhaps most to blame for pushing alcohol on their fellow students, underage or not. Put aside the extreme cases of hazing, which we all know take place here at Harvard and should be more of a concern. It is our social scene itself that every weekend, and on many a weeknight, too, damages the psyche of the non-drinker. I guarantee you that every time you plan a party around scorpion bowls or keg stands, someone feels pressured to drink. I have been that person. I guarantee you that every time you go around the room and have each person name a favorite drink, someone feels unwelcome and unwanted. I have been that person, too.

Non-drinkers don't often speak up, but they're there; all too often, they're either seething in anger or cowering in embarrassment. Regardless of what the College does, only when we stop acting on the assumption that everyone drinks will non-drinkers get the respect, and the time to think it over, they deserve.

Geoffrey C. Upton '99 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett in House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.