Stanford measures up favorably against national yardsticks of student alcohol use. For example, 44 percent of undergraduates in a nationwide survey engaged in binge drinking at least once in a two-week period, compared with 27 percent on the Farm.
That’s what worries Ralph Castro, the alcohol and drug educator at Vaden Health Center.
“Don’t look at the data,” he says. “We have 15,000 students on this campus. If one student dies, [whether the other 14,999 drank responsibly] means nothing. It would be a huge blow to the entire University.”
To help get that message out, the Alcohol Advisory Board commissioned two of its student members to write a guide to alcohol awareness. What’s Your Policy?, a 73-page spiral-bound booklet, aims to be a comprehensive resource that pulls together information from a wide range of campus offices, including Residential Education, the Dean of Students Office and Vaden. Residence staff members introduced the guide to entering freshmen during Orientation.
“The students wanted it to be a complete guide that looked at taking care of yourself and looking out for others, that gave proactive, positive messages, but also did dispel and demystify what happens behind the scenes with students and Judicial Affairs, or organizations that get put on alcohol probation,” says Castro, who is chairing the advisory board this year. Erik Wong, ‘03, and Moses Pounds, ‘04, wrote the first draft; Castro and Health Promotion Services director Carole Pertofsky edited it and added some material. “The student voice is still there,” Castro says. No kidding; witness the discussion of front loading, or drinking a lot in a short amount of time: “Although it may initially seem cool, most people visit the ‘porcelain god’ about an hour or two later.”
The advisory board then turned to Thunder Factory, a San Mateo-based marketing firm, to put what Castro calls an “edgy stamp” on the guide. Splashy orange palm trees decorate the cover; stylized faces with dramatic expressions delineate sections inside. “We knew we had achieved what we wanted to achieve when administrators went, ‘Oh, no’ and students went, ‘Oh, yes,’” Castro says.
The guide, which will be posted online later this year, discusses alcohol’s effects on health, party planning and student organizations’ responsibilities, University policy and California law. Student anecdotes relate cautionary tales and illustrate different choices about whether, how and when to drink—the personal “policies” the authors suggest each reader create. The booklet pays particular attention to the use of hard alcohol—on the rise at Stanford, Castro says—and stresses students’ responsibility to take care of one another on a residential campus.
“It was made by us. It wasn’t marketed to us,” Castro says. “We know the messages in there work for our students—they were drafted by our students for our students.”
