A young generation's irksome toxicology gap

80% of college students drink, 50% of those binge drink. Meaning 4 out of 10 college students remain unclear about the purpose of alcohol.
I never understood this statistic, or rather, I've always thought it was wrong. Not the fact of drinking, I went to Catholic school. Those numbers should be higher. Kids--in college, to the tune of 40%--drink without the intention of getting drunk. One could say drinking responsibly. Sounds like there's a D.A.R.E. official looking for a promotion.

This is something so intuitively obvious that doesn't require statistics, it can be deduced with a bit of Socratic Metaphysicism, a Cartesian thought experiment.

Are there now, walking among us, humans, sufficiently adapted, who can relish the taste of Gordon's Dry Gin? Is there now a Natural Light gene that makes cheap alcohol serviceable to the human palate from anything but a latex tube shoved past the tastebuds? If no to the above: are kids more wealthy now than they were uh year and uh half ago?

In college, living among Spokane's wealthiest trustifarians and business majors, no one drank good beer and everyone drank to get drunk. Then, on special occasions, like one of the four-thousand observed Catholic holidays, when kids put away the cough syrup and stole dad's secret bottle of Grey Goose, they still got drunk, not knowing what else to do. In Europe, the third year of a four year tour of duty, when we got ass-canned on $50 dollar wines at the school's expense, it was a cultural necessity of living in-country. The nice men just kept putting bottles on the table.

Point being, there is nothing moderate about college. It's a binary place, a place of ones and zeros, ons and offs. Self-regulation is going straight.

In college, there were two groups, not three. Drinkers and abstainers. Those who casually sat down with a cold one in front of a favored sporting event were not one beer drinkers, they were beating off a hangover or fighting off the shakes, such full-blown alcoholics that drinking to get drunk is like breathing to get breath, instinctual. I had friends in both camps, often oscillating between the two.

I'd lay even money that the 40% who reportedly consume less than 4 drinks were caught early enough in the morning that they could still remember what beer they were on. 0,1,2 or 3 being the number left in the case he or she fell asleep next to.

This is why, in addition to non-smoking and drinking dorms, they now have dorms for recovering substance abusers.

That's not to say that my collegiate years were a whirlwind of debauchery, I was healthily in both columns myself for long periods of time, either having a good drunk or not. And, in the intervening years, my tastes have certainly undergone a process of sophistication, the kind of sophistication that can only come from disposable income or a knack for larceny. There are now, I'm happy to say, beers and liquors I can drink with moderation, beers and liquors whose taste I can meditate upon, whose aromatic essences reward a linger on the tongue. Beers and liquors I never had access to in college. These are lagers of breeding whose fermentation process takes place in the bellies of suckling pigs, and liquors of consequence, distilled from the perspiration of God himself. Beers that cost more than the minimum hourly wage of my home state; Liquors whose proceeds could feed an Indonesian orphan, allowing him to fend off rickets until he becomes a ward of Nike.

Looking around, I realize that I've come full circle and can no longer afford these treats. I guess it's back to binge drinking, or, more in line with my current fiscal solubility, cutting myself with razor blades and spending time in a closet with the nerve gas Grandpa brought back from Okinawa.