To the Editor:
It's becoming increasingly common to see articles like your "Survey reports rise in binge drinking" [The Dartmouth, January 7, 1997], which at first glance seem quite alarming. A drinking binge, as I've always understood the term from books, films and experience, means staying drunk for at least several days.
Indeed, Charles Jackson's book "The Lost Weekend" and the film of the same name starring Ray Milland in an Academy-Award winning performance, which were crucial in popularizing the AA view of alcoholism, are precisely an account of a writer's six-day binge, during which he puts away a couple of quarts of Scotch a day. And this he regards as minor binge: "... in his present weakened condition he knew that six days would be about the limit of his endurance. No three-week bender this time, ending up in Chicago, Philadelphia, the Fall River boat, a filthy room in a 9th Avenue hotel --God knows where."
And Dartmouth has its own well-known factual binge story: when F. Scott Fitzgerald came here in March 1939 to work on the script of "Winter Carnival", he stayed drunk and entertained fraternities, until after three days he was fired and dragged back to New York. (The episode is recounted as fiction in Budd Schulberg's novel '"The Disenchanted").
Is this what 41 percent of Dartmouth first-year students are doing? Staying drunk for days on end? Well, no. When we go on to read the fine print, in those articles that bother to include it, we see that binge drinking is "defined" to mean having 5 or more drinks on a couple of occasions in the last couple of weeks (4 or more for a woman, some articles tell us).
So this "binge drinking" we read about is not to be confused with "drinking binge". Or is it? I'd like to know who introduced this term, which certainly does not come from the vernacular, and whether those who have so avidly adopted it really claim to be unaware how likely it is to be confused with something far more extreme than having 5 or 6 beers on a Saturday night.
I support the efforts of those who endeavor to discourage college students from excessive drinking. Surely, though, they should be able to do so without resorting to hysterical hyperbole. May we not rightly expect these reformers themselves to show in their approach some restraint and sobriety?
