College student drinking isn't just a college problem.

It's a community problem.

As Portland Press Herald reporter Beth Quimby documented in her two-part series on Sunday and Monday, liquor-law violations are increasing at Maine's colleges and universities. Each year, for example, approximately 100 Colby students are treated at the college's clinic for possible alcohol overdose. About half of those students end up so ill that they must go to the emergency room at Maine General Medical Center. Some cases end up in intensive care.

Those cases are in part the result of binge drinking, which is customarily defined as the consumption of five or more drinks in succession by men, four or more by women. According to a Columbia University study of students nationwide, the number who drink to "get drunk" rose by 21 percent between 1993 and 2001, and the number of binge drinkers rose by 16 percent during that period.

Here in Maine, the number of liquor-law violations among students rose 57 percent from 2002 to 2006. The actual number of alcohol-related incidents such as arrests or disciplinary actions at Maine colleges or universities grew from 1,985 in 2002 to 3,120 in 2006. Two students died of alcohol-related accidents this school year in Maine.

"Every night I go to sleep there is some part of my brain asking, 'Is this going to be the night I get the phone call?'" asks Dr. Paul Berkner, medical director at Colby College's health center.

Traditionally, colleges have dealt with the problem of underage and binge drinking by mounting educational campaigns for their students that focus on the individual drinker. That's understandable, since colleges are in the education business.

But young adults are notoriously immune to warnings about risky behavior. There's even some evidence that their brains do not fully develop the capacity to judge risk and consequently regulate behavior until they are at least 25 years old. Talk to most college-age students about the dangers of drinking and they'll roll their eyes at what they see as hopelessly old-fashioned, patronizing and out-of-touch blather.

Furthermore, asking students to inhibit themselves in an alcohol-soaked culture, where they are bombarded with images of how much fun it is to drink with friends -- who are all attractive young men or women -- is asking too much. Major liquor companies pay millions of dollars to produce and run television ads about the joys of drinking that include the tiniest token messages at the end to "drink responsibly." That's going to get kids to drink responsibly? Oh, please. It might, however, convince the public that while liquor companies may be marketing their products to appeal to young people, they're doing it in a responsible way.

So, too, the link between college sports and drinking is real and documented. One finding of a long-term study of college drinking by Harvard School of Public Health researchers shows that more sports fans are binge drinkers than non-fan students. That linkage is, of course, not isolated to just college sports -- it continues beyond college to fans of professional sports.

Closer to home, there are just too many ways to get liquor easily. Getting a fake ID is a common rite of passage for new college students who are under the drinking age. So is going to the neighborhood bar, which may have a "college night" and cheap deals on all-you-can-drink beer. Harvard social psychologist Henry Wechsler, part of the team studying college drinking, sent trained observers into 830 bars, clubs and restaurants near 118 college campuses across the country. They found promotions like "Bring your best fake i.d.," and "$5 Gets You a Cup" with "as much beer and bar pours as you can handle from 9 to midnight."

Finally, enforcement by campus security is often less-than-draconian. Underage drinkers, for example, are rarely turned over to the police for prosecution.

So while colleges have been busy trying to educate their students about the evils of alcohol abuse, the number of students abusing alcohol keep going up. What can be done?

It takes a culture, and a community, to fight student drinking. And that means that colleges, notoriously loathe to engage in shaping public policy, are going to have to do just that on both the local and even state level.

A program devised by the American Medical Association called "A Matter of Degree" encourages just such town-gown engagement to stem drinking and alcohol-related problems at colleges.

The colleges that implemented the program showed measurable decreases in rates of drinking and binge drinking incidents. Program components include controlling alcohol advertising and promotion in the community, keg registration, mandatory training of beverage servers, stronger and more consistent campus-local police collaboration, curbs on selling alcohol without a license and alcohol-free activities.

"If we are to reduce the dangerous levels of campus drinking and its consequences," said former AMA President J. Edward Hill, "colleges and surrounding communities must cooperate to reduce the numerous environmental factors that contribute to alcohol abuse."

Fundamentally, the AMA program makes it harder for kids to get their hands on alcohol. Short of across-the-board prohibition for everyone in society (and we know how well that worked), that looks like the most effective way of stemming this dangerous trend.