Moore, Abigail Sullivan. (15 Jan

Moore, Abigail Sullivan. (15 Jan 2005) "Just Say No? No Need Here." The New York Times. Sunday Edition. Education Life Supplement. Section 4a, Column 1, p.17. The subject of this article is a familiar one -- underage drinking on campus. However, rather than begin her article with a woeful tale of academic or physical death and destruction, Abigail Sullivan Moore chronicles what she considers a positive intervention strategy practiced by Fairfield University. The college has a strict anti-drinking policy for students under twenty-one.

When one baseball scholarship star was caught with alcohol on campus, he was forced to attend substance abuse education classes, or else face university probation and the loss of his scholarship. The philosophical stress of the Fairfield program is not punitive, but instead tries to foster healthy attitudes about drugs and drinking. It stresses not that drinking is bad, but tries to inveigh against harmful drinking. It conveys the message that binge drinking is not the norm.

Is this true? A 2002 National Institute of Health study, cited by Moore, estimates 22-44% of all college students drink to excess. Of the colleges surveyed by the NIH, 1400 students may have died from drinking-related crimes, and 600,000 were injured through alcohol-related assault. Yet only 12% go on to become alcoholics, the study found, suggesting this was a campus rather than a purely personal problem attributable to the student's personalities alone. The Fairfield program functions as a get out of jail free policy, states university officials.

Now, at Fairfield University, the targeted students report drinking less after the intervention. The reporter seems to find the 'non-judgmental' nature of the program quite favorable. But this first article on education and substance abuse in higher education is apparently designed to support the non-judgmental program at Fairfield University fairly uncritically. The article cites extremely problematic and potentially biased statistics in support of the program. First, the university hosting the program compiled the statistics regarding the program. Second, the statistics were from are unverified student estimates of personal drinking habits.

Even if anonymous, students may not have a good idea of what 'drinking less' as 69% reported doing (and 25% said 'significantly less,' an equally value personal estimate) means, in relation to how they were drinking before the program. The students reporting on their personal habits might even fear that the university might catch onto their continued habits of binging, and enact punitive measures against them.

Even the National Institute of Health study is unclear, as it is not certain what colleges were surveyed, regarding student alcohol habits, if certain environments and colleges were more conducive binge-drinking habits than to others, and what is defined as an alcoholic -- again, many alcohol abusers, especially young professionals right put of college might both see themselves as such, especially if binge drinking became customary in college, but that does not mean the 12% statistic is accurate. Also, a 22-44% estimate of excessive drinking is a tremendous margin of error.

Summary Article 2 Mulkern, Anne C. "Drug's Suicide Risk Prompts Warning (17 Oct 2004) the Denver Post. Section a: p. 24 While no one condones student excessive drinking as a positive societal development, the use of antidepressants for teens remains far more controversial, as does the correlation between teen suicide and prescription antidepressants.

The makers of Zoloft state that adolescents commit suicide because of depression in numbers upwards of 500,000 per year -- although the difficulty of attributing suicide to a singular cause or psychological ailment, much less by the drug manufacture of an antidepressant is problematic. The statistic that 89% of doctors prescribe antidepressant drugs to adolescents for unapproved uses is from a less biased source; a Harvard psychiatrist seems more credible, although the definition of 'unapproved' or off-label is also murky.

10-11 million prescriptions were written for antidepressants for teens last year, a verifiable statistic. The article's main focus, however, is that now these drugs must carry a warning label that they have the risk of causing suicidal ideation. 2-3 out of every 100 teens prescribed the drugs has reported an increase in suicidal thoughts -- but does the population of teens using the drugs already have a high suicide risk, one might ask? The reporter does not raise this.