All Posts Tagged With: "drinking"
“Nazi Ring of Fire” drinking game leads to broken nose
Jewish student objected
Photo by Ben Alford on Flickr
Students at the famous London School of Economics are facing discipline after a Jewish student objected to a Nazi-themed drinking game during a school ski trip and received a broken nose.
A video of the drinking game, which took place in early December in France, was uploaded to YouTube, shared of Facebook and then removed, according to The Beaver student newspaper.
The game, called “Nazi Ring of Fire,” involved arranging cards on a table in the shape of a Swastika. The game compelled players to commit antisemitic acts including “saluting the Fuhrer.”
Continue reading “Nazi Ring of Fire” drinking game leads to broken nose
Big drop in drug use among teens
Cigarette smoking plummets
Photo by austinanomic on Flickr
A survey administered to nearly 10,000 teens in Ontario shows big drops in the use of most drugs when compared to similar teens 12 years ago.
The Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey found an especially encouraging drop in the number of students who smoke cigarettes. In 1999, 28 per cent of students in grades seven to 12 said they smoked in the past year and 22 per cent smoked at least one cigarette daily. In 2011, only nine per cent said they smoked in the past year and only four per cent said they smoked daily. The rates are higher in northern Ontario, where eight per cent smoked daily in 2011.
St. Thomas bans alcohol in residence
Follows apparent drunken vandalism
Alcohol has been banned at the Harrington Hall student residence at St. Thomas University in Fredericton for an indefinite period. The decision was made after fire extinguishers were discharged and glass was broken in apparent acts of drunken vandalism. Larry Batt, Dean of Students, told CBC News that the prohibition is meant to be a wake-up call for residents. The ban will last at least until the end of the calendar year. Many students were defiant as the ban came into effect on Sunday. Ryan Walters, a 19-year-old student, said that on the first night of the alcohol ban, “everybody just got wasted.” St. Thomas developed a strict behaviour code after student Andrew Bartlett hit his head and died last year after an off-campus party where hazing occurred.
The Hamburgler turns himself in
Video: student breaks into McDonald’s and makes a meal
Capture from video by Cedar Falls Times on YouTube
Police in Cedar Falls, Iowa say a college student turned himself in after they appealed to the public to turn-in the real-life “Hamburgler” who broke into a McDonald’s in the wee hours of Nov. 20.
Footage obtained by the Cedar Falls Times shows 21-year-old Whitley Allen Teslow tapping on the drive-thru window before climbing into the closed restaurant, raiding the freezer and preparing his own hamburgers, fries and soda—which he consumes before exiting through the same drive-thru window. Needless to say, he was drunk.
Date rape drug shows up in Nanaimo, B.C.
Student may have been sexually assaulted and drugged
Photo by Robert S. Donovan on Flickr
Vancouver Island University is warning students via Twitter to guard their drinks. A woman who was sexually assaulted in Nanaimo recently may have been given the date-rape drug GHB.
Another young woman says her doctor confirmed she was given the drug in October. CTV Vancouver Island reports that the woman was found by a friend in a parkade around 3 a.m. after attending a nightclub. She had no recollection of the evening, but her friend says a stranger had shared her drink earlier that night.
V.I.U. has been using custom drink coasters to warn students about how easy it is for people to slip odourless and colourless GHB into their drinks, reports Canada.com.
Cheers to the Science Pub
Café lectures trend grows
The University of Regina is offering free general interest lectures served alongside pints of beer.
It’s part of a growing trend in university towns where students are proving they’re interested in learning for the sake of learning—so long as they can simultaneously eat snacks and drink beer.
The Science Pub series was created by Bev Robertson, a professor emeritus who now owns the Bushwakker Brewpub where the monthly event is held. He told the Leader-Post that he got the idea after hearing about similar events further west.
What’s on your mind?
How your still-developing brain puts you at risk
Illustration by Ian Phillips and Taylor Shute.
From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings—on sale now.
Heading off to university is a time-worn rite of passage, one that marks the transition from teen years to adulthood. Despite the new relationships, responsibilities and independence that come with leaving home, however, in our late teens and early twenties, we’re still not fully mature. Our brains keep developing well into these years.
When puberty hits, brain regions responsible for reward and pleasure kick into high gear, according to Temple University psychology professor Laurence Steinberg, author of You and Your Adolescent. But other regions, involved in decision-making and impulse control, are slower to develop—and don’t mature until our mid-twenties. “The accelerator is activated before there’s a good braking system in place,” he says. Teens in mid-to-late adolescence are prone to risky decisions, seeking rewards without weighing the consequences. Starting a new life on campus, these brain changes affect students’ lives in all sorts of ways—maybe pushing them to stay out drinking all night, sign up for a semester abroad in Europe, sleep right through class, or ask their crush out on a date.
High demand for alcohol-free and quiet floors
Vindication for residence management at Alberta
Photo by mathplourde on Flickr
There was high demand for alcohol-free and quiet floors at a University of Alberta residence that decided to offer them for the first time this year. That result seems to vindicate residence management, whose consultation process was criticized last year by the Lister Hall Student’s Association, reports The Gateway.
Among applicants to Lister Hall, 24 per cent requested an alcohol-free floor and 46 per cent requested a quiet floor. That’s similar to what Residence Services predicted using their consultation process, which included a survey that found 51 per cent of the 302 residents surveyed last year would opt for a quiet floor and 19 per cent would live on an alcohol-free floor. The process began after residence management noticed a great number of people were leaving Lister in the first semester and suspected it might be due to rowdy weekend nights. Then-LHSA-President Dustin Edwards suggested there were likely other reasons for the exodus.
Continue reading High demand for alcohol-free and quiet floors
School uses app to keep freshmen out of parties
Students worry about privacy
Photo by Brian Lane Winfield Moore on Flickr
An American university has gone to great lengths to enforce its new rule that first-semester students may not attend fraternity or sorority events.
Cornell University is releasing an ID scanning application for Apple devices. Fraternity and sorority party organizers will be required to borrowan iPod with the application installed from the school, which they’ll use at the doors of their social events. The app allows them to check student’s names, class years and whether they’ve reached 21, the legal drinking age in the U.S.
The information scanned is accessible “to a limited few in our office… and stored on a secure server with no plans to share further,” Travis Apgar, associate dean of students for fraternity and sorority affairs, told The Sun. “The use of the scanners will improve [the Greek community’s] management of risk by properly identifying the class year of attendees,” he said.
Continue reading School uses app to keep freshmen out of parties
Teens doing dangerous things in cars
Startling findings in annual drug use report
Photo by eduard_orbitron on Flickr
The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse has released their annual report, which brings together surveys of drug use among teens from the various provinces. What’s most startling is the risky behaviours Grade 12 students are engaging in before driving. Depending on the province:
—up to 20 per cent report driving within an hour of having two or more drinks
—up to 38 per cent report being a passenger with a driver who was drinking
—up to 20 per cent report being a passenger with a driver who had “too much to drink”
—up to 21 per cent report driving within an hour of using cannabis
Clearly young people need to plan safer rides home.
There were also interesting, if less shocking, findings about teen drug and alcohol use in general. The study looked at students in grades seven, nine, 10 and 12 and found that the amount of teens who had drank alcohol at least once in their lifetimes ranged from 52 per cent of Albertan teens to 70 per cent of Newfoundland teens. Those figures climb as high as 90 per cent by twelfth grade.
Guelph rugby team suspended
Drunken party involved “an initiation”
The University of Guelph’s men’s rugby team is suspended for two games over an off-campus party.
Athletics director Tom Kendall told The Globe and Mail that a Sept. 17 party violated the school’s athletics code because of misuse of alcohol and an initiation. ”It’s more the alcohol,” Kendall said. “Nobody was hurt and the police weren’t involved. It wasn’t severe in that sense, it wasn’t a hazing incident,” he added, although he said it’s “not 100 per cent clear” what type of initiation occurred.
St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. recently unveiled its draft student behaviour code, which imposes up to $500 fines and possible expulsion for incidents of hazing at off-campus gatherings where more than two STU students are present. That policy was developed after a STU student died from injuries at a party where excessive drinking and hazing reportedly occurred.
Guelph’s Gryphons rugby team will forfeit two upcoming games, against Toronto and McMaster.
Remove drunken posts. Change privacy setting.
What researchers are doing on Facebook
Photo by LifeSupercharger on Flickr
Students who post on Facebook about “getting drunk” or “blacking out” or “getting wasted” might want to change their privacy settings.
U.S. researchers have determined that if you post about getting wasted you’re at a higher risk for alcohol abuse. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which funded the study, suggests schools consider creeping students’ public profiles to “identify and intervene with college students who are at risk for alcohol use problems,” said director Kenneth Warren.
Researchers looked at the public Facebook profiles of more than 300 undergraduate students and invited the students to use an online version of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, or AUDIT, a screening tool that clinicians use to measure problem drinking. “We found that underage college students who referenced dangerous drinking habits, such as intoxication or blacking out, were more likely to have AUDIT scores that indicate problem drinking or alcohol-related injury,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An AUDIT score of 8 or higher means the person is at risk of a problem drinking. Underage students who referenced “being drunk” or “getting wasted” in the study had audit scores of 9.5 on average. Students who had no references to alcohol scored 4.7 on average. In other words, the tool could work.
But what about protecting students’ privacy from creeping admins? Someone should study that too.
21+ rules may violate human rights code
Adults of legal age have a right to be served: expert
Photo by Yoshimai on Flickr
Young adults, especially men, are being barred from entering drinking establishments in Canada based solely on their age — and these are men who are have reached the provincially-mandated minimum age for drinking. Many clubs are restricting entry to those over the age of 21. Women often get a free pass if they’re of legal age.
But the practice may be a Human Rights Code violation, Raj Anand, former commissioner of Ontario’s Human Rights Commission told The Globe and Mail. “There are certain circumstances in which the stereotype of irresponsibility that attaches to young, unmarried men is sanctioned by law –– see their car insurance rates –– but visiting a bar or nightclub is not one of them. In my view, exclusion of an adult of drinking age is a violation of the Human Rights Code.”
Club owners and event planners defend the practice, suggesting that younger men are more likely to arrive drunk and spend less money.
But the rules are the rules. So young men, the next time a bouncer looks at your ID and tells you scram, just point out that it’s a human rights code violation. That ought to get you in, right?
Should universities punish students for off-campus behaviour?
STU’s new code of conduct strikes the right balance: Petz
Photo courtesy of eliduke on Flickr
Keep on your best behavior St. Thomas students or you could not be a STU student no more. The university has a new code of conduct that will apply to your activities both on and off campus. A committee of university officials, students and faculty will now be able to impose punishments for things like hazing, including fines of up to $500 and expulsion. Seems draconian, right?
The new rules are the result of a policy review that followed the death of Andrew Bartlett. Bartlett died last October after attending his volleyball team’s initiation party at an off-campus residence where hazing and excessive drinking allegedly took place before he fell down a flight of stairs and fatally injured his head.
Though it’s clear that universities should be accountable for their students while they’re living, working and studying on campus, policing student behavior off-campus is more controversial.
But by limiting their code of conduct to occasions when students are clearly representing the university, STU’s new code of conduct strikes the right balance between student rights to behave how they like and the university’s right to protect its reputation—-not to mention their duty to keep students safe. The code rightly spells-out which behaviours are acceptable and which are not.
To violate the code, an incident must involve at least two STU students and occur at a university-sanctioned event or one where the student is representing the university. Hazing is highlighted, with a list of more than 20 examples spelled out. Overall, hazing is defined as “any activity expected of someone joining a group (or to maintain full status in a group) that humiliates, degrades or risks emotional and/or physical harm, regardless of the person’s willingness to participate,” reports The Aquinian student newspaper.*
The death of Andrew Bartlett is not the first incident to prompt questions about whether university discipline rules should reach off campus. Following allegations of hazing at the University of Alberta chapter of Delta Kappa Epilson fraternity at their off-campus location, the university suspended the fraternity for five years, disallowing DKE from using university services or associating itself with the U of A. Despite calls for a harsher punishment, there was little else the university could do to discipline the chapter under the U of A’s code of student behavior.
Another incident that stirred up debate on university discipline was the Stanley Cup rioting in Vancouver. Some wanted the University of British Columbia to punish those found guilty of taking part in looting. A spokesperson for the UBC told campus paper The Ubyssey that they would be letting the police and the courts determine discipline for any students involved in the looting.
Like STU, UBC made the right choice there too.It’s reasonable for universities to try to protect their students’ safety and their own reputations, but universities are no substitute for good parenting and good decisions on the part of students. Their duty only goes so far.
*This story has been updated from an earlier version that failed to attribute details of the draft code to The Aquinian, a student newspaper at St. Thomas University. Maclean’s On Campus regrets the error.
Who should teach teenagers about drinking?
Universities and parents have a duty to educate
Photo by Dave Chidley/CP
From the editors of Maclean’s
Some predictions can be made with absolute certainty. The tides will shift. The sun will rise. And young university students will drink to excess.
From Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Animal House, exuberant drinking by underage students has long been a part of the experience of going away to school. Realistically, there is little society can do to change this fact of life. But what can we all do to cut down on the harm it may cause?
Last week, Canada’s university community was shocked by an orientation-week death at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S. A first-year student from Calgary, just 19 years old, was found unconscious in a basement dorm room at the school suffering from severe alcohol poisoning. He later died in hospital. Fellow students told reporters he’d been playing a competitive drinking game called “flip cup” and had consumed an estimated 40 ounces of alcohol during the night.
This follows two student deaths at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., last year that the provincial coroner’s office attributed, in part, to a “culture of drinking on campus.” Both men, aged 18 and 19, fell to their deaths after drinking, one from a residence window, the other from the roof of a library.
The accidental death of a son or daughter is an unimaginable tragedy. But the death of a freshman student during their first few weeks away from home seems particularly difficult for any mother or father. While a university can never become a surrogate parent, it is nonetheless expected that campus residences will be a sufficiently safe place for teenaged students to live as they make their final strides to adulthood.
The recent deaths thus raise two difficult questions: who bears responsibility for instructing teenagers in the risks of alcohol abuse; and how should schools deal with students’ inevitable desire to party.
The obvious place to begin educating about alcohol is at home, as it is with most other topics. Someone needs to let every teenager know that drinking 40 ounces of alcohol in one night is reckless and dangerous behaviour, and parents are the obvious candidates. A full and frank discussion on drinking and its consequences is as necessary before heading off to school as packing sufficient underwear and pens.
In fact, many parents believe monitored underage drinking at home is the best way to teach teens about learning your limits. Depending on the situation and teen involved, this may make considerable sense, and be entirely legal. Of course there are serious risks to this sort of parental permissiveness as well. This month, an Orillia, Ont., mother found herself facing criminal charges in New York for providing alcohol to her 14-year-old son. After being served a few beers by his mother while camping, he wandered off at night and drowned.
As for universities, most now recognize an important obligation to protect the youngest students from their wildest instincts, at least during those first few days away from home. The initial week of school was once a time of unremitting partying. Today many universities have banned alcohol entirely from campus during this time. Most have also changed the name from frosh week to orientation week to make this distinction clear.
Going further, some forward-thinking universities have declared first-year residences to be dry throughout orientation week. The University of Guelph has had such a policy in place for the past two years. Where kids once showed up at university residence with a case of beer among their luggage, Brenda Whiteside, assistant vice-president for student affairs at Guelph, says those days are now over. The new week-long regime “sends a strong message about creating a new culture in our residences,” she says. During orientation week at Acadia, on-campus activities were alcohol-free, but the residences were not, as the flip cup games attest.
It seems reasonable that every Canadian university should set an appropriate tone for the school year by eliminating alcohol from first-year residences during orientation week. And some schools should be encouraged to experiment with the more drastic step of banning alcohol entirely from all first-year residences—particularly given that a large number of those students will be underage. This might even become a marketing advantage, at least from the perspective of nervous parents.
University students will drink, and it is naive to ignore this fact. But parents and universities—and the students themselves, who have an equal responsibility to look out for one another—must find ways to make our campuses safer, regardless of life’s inevitabilities.
Knife fight injures six near McMaster
Party-goers came from club outlawed by McMaster
Four people went to hospital and at least two others were cut during a knife fight at a party near McMaster University. Police entered the party at 69 Mount Royal Ave. at 4:30 Friday morning.
Earlier in the night, police arrested two people at an event called ACADEMIX 101, which was taking place at Club 77 in downtown Hamilton. The event was advertised by Next Level Entertainment (NLE), which calls itself “McMaster’s official entertainment and talent group” on Facebook. Last year, McMaster University banned all events that take place at Club 77 from being advertised on its campus.*
Police entered Club 77 after hearing about fights inside. Two 20-year-old men, one from Brampton and the other from Mississauga, were arrested. Later, police contended with a crowd of roughly 400 people outside of the club. Some of those people ended up at the party on Royal Ave., police said.
No victim or witness has co-operated with police so far. The house has a smashed front door, a slashed window screen and metal bars from a railing on the front porch are bent or missing.
Next Level Entertainment’s Facebook page appears to be administered by Kisanath WooDz and Pratheeb K’mar. “AT MCMASTER STUDENT CENTER SELLING TICKETS,” WooDz posted to the page on Thursday around 4 p.m. Earlier in the day, someone listed as a student at York University, wrote that 900 tickets had been sold. Before that, someone else posted that “…the Waterloo/Laurier bus is officially SOLD OUT, only bus left is the York bus.”
*This story originally repeated an incorrect fact that the Hamilton Spectator had attributed to a McMaster spokesperson. Gord Arbeau of Community and Public Relations at McMaster clarified on Monday that Next Level Entertainment was not banned from campus. It was the promotion of events at Club 77 that McMaster University had banned. Maclean’s On Campus regrets the error.
Acadia student dies after binge drinking
Student was seen playing “flip cup” in residence
Acadia photo courtesy of Martin Cathrae on Flickr
An male student at Acadia University who was sent to hospital earlier this week has died.
The 19-year-old from Calgary was found unconscious Tuesday morning around 12:30 a.m. in a basement dorm room inside Chipman House residence, reports CBC News.
“It is with tremendous sorrow that Acadia University today confirms that our student, who had been critically ill since September 6, has died. Our deepest and most heartfelt condolences are extended to all family members and friends,” the school wrote on its website. “Acadia will continue to respect the family’s request that no other personal details be released.”
Nathan Rodger told CBC News on Tuesday that the student in question had been playing a drinking game before paramedics took him away to the hospital.
“He was drinking a 40 [oz.] of something and he pretty much drank the whole thing,” Rodger said. “Yeah, we were playing ‘flip cup’ and he had it straight in the can, just right in the thing. Not even mixing it. I think he finished probably most of it, all of it.”
Teen drives drunk from UVic to police station
Woman was trying to bail out boyfriend
Photo courtesy of davisonscott15 on Flickr
Police in Saanich, B.C. arrested a 19-year-old for impaired driving after she drove to the police station to try and bail her under-aged boyfriend, reports the Times Colonist.
The 18-year-old boyfriend had been picked up at the University of Victoria on Sunday around 10 p.m., because he was slurring his speech and barely able to stand, police spokesman Sgt. Dean Jantzen said. The legal drinking age in B.C. is 19.
The girlfriend arrived at the police station half an hour after he was picked up. She told police she had taken a taxi there, but surveillance cameras revealed she had not. When she left, police followed her back to a vehicle where she was administered a breathalyzer test, which she failed. The car will been impounded for 90 days.
Former premier’s son gets three years in prison
Tobin guilty of impaired driving that killed friend
Jack Tobin, son of former Newfoundland and Labrador premier Brian Tobin, has been sentenced to three years in prison and won’t be allowed to drive for seven years, reports CBC News.
Tobin pleaded guilty to the impaired driving that killed 24-year-old Alex Zolpis, who was pinned under a truck in an Ottawa parking garage on Christmas Eve. The friends had been drinking in the Byward Market before they arrived at the garage, where Tobin performed stunts in the truck.
The court heard that Tobin had three prior driving suspensions that followed multiple infractions.
Scientists develop date-rape drug detector
Have campus parties just gotten a little safer?
It’s a rule of thumb at any campus party: never leave your drink unattended. But two Israeli scientists say they have developed a new sensor that is 100 percent accurate at detecting date-rape drugs in drinks, potentially rendering the rule somewhat less compulsory.
According to AFP, Professor Fernando Patolsky and Doctor Michael Ioffe of Tel Aviv University’s school of chemistry have created a sensor that, when inserted into a drink, indicates the presence of GHB (gamma-hydrobuxybutyric acid) and ketamine, two of the most common date-rape drugs. The device has been tested on a variety of popular cocktails and soft drinks and has been able to detect the drugs in spiked drinks every time. The scientists are working to expand the sensor’s capabilities to include to detection of Rohypnol, another common date-rape drug.
The pair expects the final production of the device to akin to the size of a stir stick, potentially available for sale in the next year and a half.
