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Stanford's New Alcohol Policy Isn't Based On Much Research (vice.com)
Sophia Carter-Kahn, reporting for Motherboard: Last week Stanford University announced a strict new alcohol policy in hopes to curb binge drinking. The new policy bans hard liquor at on-campus parties, and restricts hard alcohol in undergraduate possession to containers smaller than 750 milliliters ("a fifth"). Lisa Lapin, the vice president of university communications, clarified that the goal is to prevent medical transports [i.e. trips to the hospital]. Universities across the country are looking for new ways to deal with dangerous binge drinking. If this new restriction at Stanford is successful, it would set a precedent for how universities across the country grapple with a seemingly insurmountable alcohol problem. There's just one catch: there's little data to suggest restricting bottle size can change college drinking culture. Colleges have tried different strategies, from mailing parents flyers about alcoholism stats to policing campuses to break up parties. Dartmouth College, for example, implemented a hard alcohol ban last year. And the University of Virginia cracked down on liquor and Greek life on campus. But their efforts don't seem to be working. Drunkorexia -- skipping meals to have more room for alcohol -- is on the rise. And administrative desperation to find some way to reduce alcohol consumption has continued.
Get rid of Liddy Doles pernicious tying of Federal Highway subsidies to a drinking age of 21. Let the states lower the drinking age as they see fit, and watch the states with the lower drinking ages have a reduction of binge drinking in their colleges.
I went to a rural Baptist university. A dry campus in a dry town (the one sports bar in town could only serve beer and wine). We were going to parties on campus and getting drunk pretty much every weekend after our football games. Hell, I never even drank until I went to that school. I don't see Stanford being very successful.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Hilarious!
The largest city in Canada can't even manage to keep the subway running from 1:30 am to 6 am. The only way between the top 5 cities in Canada via public transit is Via Rail, which is so significantly more expensive than using a private airline that I have yet to meet anyone who has used it.
Heck, 1 of the top 5 cities in Canada (the one that's the capital of the whole country!) doesn't even have a rail system! Just buses!
NYC has them running 24x7 and Amtrak will take you cheaply (in comparison to Via Rail) between there and the top 5 cities in the US. And all those cities have a rail system. And so does the capital of the US. And most of them run 24x7.
In order, I'd rank Europe as best at public transit, USA as not great, and Canada as terrible.
In Canadian provinces where the MLDA is 18, teenage drinking dropped about the same as those that implemented MLDA 21. Also the reduction occurred before the introduction of zero-tolerance legislation. And the reduction is roughly proportional to those in the United States. According to the NHTSA "The Canadian reduction in youth drinking and driving must have been caused entirely by other factors."
Cite me not the self-congratulatory statistics from MADD.