What if the party never ends and you can’t put the drink down?
Growing up in a home where alcohol was always present, I understand how this toxic poison can affect a family and even break a home. The one question I’ve always wondered is, where do most parents’ alcohol problems start? As a 21-year-old college student in Fort Collins, CO, I cannot help but guess that this addiction begins around this age.
In fact, young adults (18 to 24) who are at very high risk for alcohol abuse have been reported to rank the highest in heavy drinking. Alcohol is very prominent in college towns; university social life has created a culture of drinking. Most people drink to fit in, like Samuel H., the director at the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in Fort Collins and a former alcoholic.
Samuel H. admits, “In college, I would binge drink occasionally, but I never saw it as a problem back then because everyone around me was doing it.”
His drinking later became a problem when he could not put the drinks down like the rest of his friends in college. His mentor later told him at his hometown AA facility that if drinking was not a problem, then not drinking should also not be a problem. At this point, Samuel H. was able to accept that his alcohol consumption post-college was an addiction because he and so many other postgraduates could not put the drink down.
Alicia Summers, counselor at the Fort Collins Foundations Counseling LLC suggests that college towns play a role in the culture of drinking for several reasons.
“Not only is there a social pressure to go out and drink with your friends, but the proximity of bars and clubs being so close to a campus add more pressure to drink for young adults,” says Summers.
There is a theory behind this; the mere exposure effect is a psychological term used to describe how people become more comfortable and develop a preference for things because they develop a sense of familiarity with it. The familiarity that happens in a college town starts with the plethora of bars and breweries near campus.
In contrast, drinking is also very profitable to college towns and almost essential to the economic health of small towns like Fort Collins. Vella, a bartender in Old Town, says, “We’re desperate for college kids and money, especially because these are people with disposable incomes,” says Vella.
Bars including Yeti, Rec Room, and Bar District partake in an all-you-can-drink bar-hop night called Ram Band for just $12. “Well over 500–1,000 people attend just Rec Room on Ram Band nights,” says Vella. On nights like this, one could only imagine how much money is made by all the bars that partake in this event on Ram Band nights.
However, the target market group for Ram Band is college students. These bars specifically aim to get college students into their bars without considering the adverse health effects and predisposition to alcoholic addictions implied with binge drinking.
Sure, some college-aged students can put the drinks down after nights like this, but for others, nights like this may be inconspicuously initiating an alcohol-dependent future.
“At the time when I was in college, I would have never considered my drinking to be a problem; it was when I left and realized I could not stop that I knew I had developed an alcohol addiction,” says Samuel H. now 15 years sober.
