[wwwwwwwwww]

Overdrinking is a problem that I only think is going to get worse until there's some serious changes made to how drinking is treated legally.

When I was in college, I was a part of my fraternity's "risk management" team, a group of brothers whose only job is to stay sober during parties, find people who had drunk too much or more commonly people who had completely blacked out and hush them off away from the alcohol or to a safe part of the house where they could be watched for signs of alcohol poisoning and kept safe from being taken advantage of.

If there's any one trend I've noticed while I worked risk management at those parties, it was that the more taboo it is to drink alcohol, the more that people binge drink it. It's always the students whose parents were the most uptight about drinking or those who couldn't purchase alcohol yet who were the biggest binge drinkers and most common to pass out. There was one period during which there was a university crackdown on drinking at fraternity parties, and the most noticeable thing during the crackdown was that people would drink a -lot- more.

The amazing part about it was when people turned 21, it was like they became seasoned drinkers over night. People who had problems pacing themselves during every party would instantly turn into a moderate drinker once their 21st had passed.

I think it would be very interesting to see some studies done on the taboo of drinking and whether it changes people's likelihood to overdrink, because it seemed with every crackdown measure the local police force took against drinking at parties, the problem only got worse.