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BY BETH QUIMBY
Blethen Maine Newspapers 05/05/2008

BY BETH QUIMBY

Blethen Maine Newspapers

Police and security officers patrol dorms. College keg parties have to be registered. Incoming freshmen take alcohol education courses as a condition of enrollment.

Even so, students don't seem to be fazed when police show up at parties to stop illegal off-campus drinking, said Hancock County Sheriff Bill Clark, whose department works with Maine Maritime Academy in Castine.

"They will sit there and continue to drink in front of you. They have a very casual attitude towards this type of violation. It is like, 'Oh, so what?' " Clark said.

College administrators say solving the binge and underage drinking problem on their campuses is complicated and potentially impossible. Although Maine colleges are trying a variety of strategies to curb alcohol abuse, their efforts have resulted in few positive results so far.

Liquor law violations reported by Maine campuses and those nationwide continue to rise. This school year, two freshmen -- one at the University of Maine, the other at Maine Maritime Academy -- died in alcohol-related incidents.

Today, almost every campus requires freshmen to undergo online alcohol education courses, designed to help students understand the consequences of alcohol abuse. Many colleges insist that students caught violating campus liquor rules undergo counseling.

Most colleges in Maine ban drinking games, such as "beer pong" or "caps," which make drinking a competitive activity. Some have adopted "good Samaritan" policies to encourage students to seek treatment for their dangerously inebriated friends without facing discipline or arrest.

Some of the measures were adopted after tragedies. Bowdoin College in Brunswick shut down its fraternities and banned hard liquor from campus after a visiting University of Maine student died from a fall off a fraternity roof 10 years ago.

Bates College banned all alcohol except beer and wine on its Lewiston campus after more than a dozen cases of alcohol poisonings surfaced during a Halloween party in 2000. Private parties were limited to no more than 50 people with no more than two kegs of beer.

Still, the crackdown did not lead to an end to binge drinking. In 2006, 14 students, from all grade levels, required treatment for alcohol poisoning after a fall dance.

"Virtually everyone had gotten access to hard alcohol," said Tedd Goundie, dean of students.

Colleges also are trying to be proactive.

The University of Maine at Orono, Colby College in Waterville, Unity College and Maine Maritime Academy operate on-campus pubs. Administrators say the pubs reduce the incidence of drunk driving and put students of legal drinking age in a controlled atmosphere. Bartenders will shut off anyone who gets out of control.

At Unity College in Unity, the only alcohol available at the student center is bottled beer. Drinking students must show a valid Maine state ID before donning a green wrist band with tabs that are clipped off after each beer is consumed. The limit is five bottles in three hours. On nights when a dance band plays, several hundred students may show up. But on a rainy Friday night in early April fewer than a dozen students played pool or listened to the band jamming on stage.

By 10 p.m., the staff started closing up for the evening.

Colby's pub can get crowded on Tuesday senior nights, when there is food and beer is $1. And at those times, the pub serves as a moderating influence on consumption, say some students.

Holly Andersen, 21, of Holliston, Mass., a senior international studies major, said the college pub encourages moderation. "No one ever gets beyond control," she said.

Some colleges are also stepping up enforcement with frequent security patrols through residential halls. Every night from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. a police officer is stationed at Portland Hall, the University of Southern Maine dorm in downtown Portland.

But that does not stop the illegal drinking. In 2006, the most recent year for which information is available, there were 72 alcohol-related arrests in that one dorm, which is home to 320 students. Stephen Nelson, director of the university's disciplinary office, said that if there were police posted in the university's other dorms, there would be a similar numbers of arrests.

Chet Tetreault, 19, a freshman at the University of Southern Maine who lives at Portland Hall, said the front desk does a good job at catching people breaking the drinking rules, which prohibit underage drinking or carrying even an empty alcohol beverage container in a hallway, but people still manage to drink illegally.

"I had a buddy of mine who brought in stuff through a Slurpy cup from 7-11. I mean, they were being crafty about it, but they were able to walk through the door with hard liquor and no one even suspected a thing," said Tetreault.

Other students warn that cracking down too hard just drives risky drinking underground. "The interesting thing about excessive drinking, when it does happen, it happens in small, intimate settings," said Alexander White, 21, of Beverly, Mass., a senior double history and religion major at Bowdoin College.

Doug Rooke, 22, of Seattle, a senior chemistry major at Colby, said policies that promote moderation, not abstinence, work best. It's been tried.

At one point, Colby allowed beer-and-wine nights for those of legal drinking age in its dining halls, to encourage responsible drinking. The idea was to show students that alcohol, when consumed with food and in moderation, can be more enjoyable than drinking shots of hard liquor behind closed doors in a dorm room.

But those nights have fizzled out this year because of lack of interest and funding.

It is impossible to tell whether the situation would be worse if colleges were not enforcing liquor laws and administering alcohol-education courses, and colleges aren't giving up. They are trying some new techniques that show some promise.

The University of Maine at Orono, the only campus in Maine with a full-time alcohol education staff, is claiming some success in curbing underage drinking from its new residential life program, which segregates freshmen in dorms with beefed-up professional residential staff. The dorms are close to a refurbished dining hall and a new athletic recreation center.

Dean of Students Robert Dana said the number of referrals for alcohol counseling are down 36 percent and fewer freshmen are dropping out of school after the first semester.

Last year, the freshmen dorms had an 85 percent occupancy rate in the second semester. This year, the freshman dorms have a 98.5 percent occupancy rate.

At the University of Southern Maine, students who have violated college alcohol policies must take a two-session screening and intervention program that gives them feedback about their own drinking patterns. The number of second-time violators has dropped off during the two years that the program has been in place, said Lee Anne Dodge, a part-time partnership staffer and substance abuse prevention coordinator at USM.

"The good news is these strategies do not take a lot of money," she said.

Dodge sees other signs of progress. She said the very fact that colleges are reporting more liquor law violations shows they are trying to address underage and binge drinking by stepping up enforcement.

In Maine, college administrators are working together to help solve campus alcohol abuse. Twenty out of Maine's 33 higher education degree-granting institutions have joined Maine's Higher Education Alcohol Prevention Partnership since it was formed in 2001.

Most of the presidents of those campuses turned out for a forum on underage drinking sponsored by Attorney General Steven Rowe earlier this month. That shows a high level of commitment in Maine, Dodge said.

It also shows these school administrators recognize the magnitude of a problem colleges haven't yet solved, despite a decade of work.

All the anti-drinking programs taking place in Maine did not prevent the death of Adam Baxter, a 19-year-old freshman University of Maine soccer player from England. He died over Thanksgiving weekend in the basement of a Portland home from acute alcohol poisoning.

Two underage men, one a former teammate, face felony charges of furnishing liquor and a place to consume it to a minor.

Nor did campus alcohol-awareness initiatives save Brett Gould, 18, of Benedicta who was killed in an alcohol-related crash. He lost control of his car on the way back to Maine Maritime Academy after a weekend of partying.

"We are up against a huge thing," Dodge said.

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