21 for 21

I couldn't wait to get carded when I turned 21.  On my birthday, I remember walking into a liquor store across the street from USC, selecting a bottle of Jose Cuervo 1800 tequila, and presenting it to the clerk along with my gleaming driver’s license with my now legal age. 

He never even glanced at the license.

That night, I drank that bottle.  I spend the following day in agony, learning the hard way why tequila’s nickname is “to kill ya”.  I still have the bottle that “did me in”.

The milestone of achieving legal drinking age is associated with rituals and alcohol fueled celebrations, generally descending into unsafe binge drinking behavior.  This has been documented in a recent scientific article.  In the July 22 issue of the journal Addiction, researchers from University of Northern British Columbia demonstrated a spike the number of ER visits from alcohol-related conditions when patients we're near their 19th birthday (the legal age for alcohol consumption in Ontario, Canada, where the study was conducted).

This result was hardly surprising.  The paper’s introduction, however, I really found interesting.  It provided an excellent review of the published research on this topic.  Binge drinking occurs more frequently at Spring Break and Christmas, but the date with the greatest degree of binge drinking is an individual’s 21^st birthday.  12% of females and 22% of males had 21 drinks in rapid succession in a “power hour”.  In Iowa City, several undergrad bars, including the Union, feature a drink special of 21 pitchers of beer for $25 (or less) on your 21^st birthday.

Another big time for binge drinking is the start of school and the onset of football season.  In our own analysis of alcohol-related visits to the ER at the University of Iowa, the largest proportion is in patients under 21.  Generally, those who are new at drinking, such as 18 year-old freshman away from home for the first time, are the ones most likely to get into trouble.  Fraternity rush week is a big week of parties that takes place the week before school starts.  Usually, the first football game comes at the end of rush week.  The website rehabs.com published an outstanding review of arrest records for Iowa City, documenting where and when the most alcohol related arrests take place.  They indeed found a huge spike in arrests at the end of rush week, the weekend of the first football game.  The largest concentration of arrests occurred at downtown bars and Kinnick stadium.

I am sad to report that Iowa is no longer the number 1 party school in the nation.  We have slipped to number 2 behind Syracuse.  But that doesn’t mean that Iowa is boring.  The 10,000 teenagers who move here from Chicago for four years aren’t just coming for the corn.  And that gives me plenty of business in the ER for a long time to come.

Fight On,

Hans

PS: The underdog contest is coming.  4 weeks to go.  Get ready