CAMPUS LIFE
Party life isn’t what it might seem, research shows.
STUDENT SHENANIGANS never fail to make the news. Frosh week, Homecoming, St. Patrick’s Day — for students they’re festive occasions worth celebrating; for emergency services and university administration they’re the culmination of months of just-in-case planning.
Noisy street parties raise the ire of area residents, but are students really such unrepentant party animals? Associate psychology professor Bruce McKay of Wilfrid Laurier University says firmly they are not. That conviction is based on responses to some 3,000 surveys he’s distributed to his students over five or six years.
“The problem is that students live in such concentrated areas around a campus,” McKay says in an interview. “There’s a handful of troublemakers at those huge parties who cause problems, and they’ve had a long run-up to that behaviour before they arrived here. It didn’t spontaneously appear on campus.
“The rest are just 19- and 20-yearolds who like to have fun. There’s no evidence that Guelph, Waterloo and Laurier students are any different than any other university students. It’s fine to be 50 and complaining about 20-year-olds, but do the 50-year-olds remember what were they like at 20?
“These problems are really quite isolated, and we deal with them. People should know that on campus there are serious consequences for bad behaviour.”
McKay’s surveys show students consistently believe their peers consume much more alcohol and marijuana and have more sex than is actually the case. “Perceptions of others can influence your own behaviour, but they wildly overestimate what their peers are up to,” McKay said. “There’s an enormous difference between the actual use of drugs and what they imagine. Our students don’t abuse certain terrifying drugs at all. We see zero use of IV drugs, methamphetamine, crack cocaine.”
McKay, a cellular and behavioural neuroscientist, investigates the mechanisms by which addictive and therapeutic drugs modify nervous system function. His surveys have enabled him to track changes in students’ use of alcohol and other drugs such as marijuana over time. They’ve also provided data which his students find interesting and meaningful because the information is about them. Q: Are your surveys scientific? A: Absolutely. They have all the necessary ethical approvals and I write academic papers on the findings. The only requirement for students to complete a survey is that they be 18 or older. I offer bonus marks to students in two of my psychology courses if they take the survey, but I also
offer alternate ways to earn bonus marks for students who don’t want to fill it out for any reason. What we have is a microcosm of what’s going on at every campus across the country. Similar studies have been done elsewhere, but not regularly so their data are older. I was fortunate to have grad student Mary Beth Dunn working with me on the surveys; she contributed a great deal to this research.
Q: How have students’ responses to the surveys changed from year to year? A: I’ve only seen changes in the use of one drug, MDMA (popularly known as Ecstasy or E). The students’ use of alcohol and marijuana is rock-steady constant over the years, but MDMA has gone from almost nothing to five to 10 times as much. MDMA is one of those drugs that can be safe if sourced therapeutically, and scientific trials are underway using it as an antianxiety drug. But on the street, you have no idea what you’re getting. On the street, MDMA often contains terrifying drugs such as methamphetamine, which can cause toxic, psychotic reactions. In its pure form, MDMA is not addictive in the way alcohol is, but meth is highly addictive. Q: Do students realize they have no way of knowing if street MDMA contains other substances? A: Some just think “why would there be anything else in it?” Others are not alarmed by the idea a street drug could have other unknown chemicals in it. What we know is that when electronic dance music becomes popular in an area, MDMA shows up; it goes hand in hand with dance music. Bar owners who have different types of music some nights, such as country music, see the differences. They tell us that when they have a dance music night, violence goes down, they need fewer bouncers and they sell less beer. But the final word is that MDMA is illegal. Q: What is known about the effects of drugs on young brains?
A: I’m looking in detail at very early use of alcohol and street drugs in children as young as 12 or 13. Some just try it out
of curiosity, others start using it regularly because of the circumstances they find themselves in. They may have relatives who drink, or they’ve experienced childhood trauma, bad relationships with teachers, family problems, poor parenting. If such circumstances didn’t exist, drinking at age 12 would just not be an option.
What we know is that one extreme intoxication at age 12 could affect the rest of their lives. We know that by their 20s, those early users are more likely to drink and use drugs more frequently, and to drink more at each sitting. Their use of tobacco is 15 times as high as that of people who were young adults before they first tried alcohol or marijuana.
Early users who transitioned to regular routine alcohol and drug use do so for a variety of reasons, such as relief from boredom, anxiety, depression, stress.
We also know the 20-year-old liver, brain and kidneys can recover from alcohol and drugs better than the 30-year-old liver, brain and kidneys can. Researchers who follow those early alcohol or drug users into their 30s and 40s see an increased risk of problems at work and at home, and an increased risk of them developing mental and/or physical or legal problems, as well as more substance abuse.
Q: Do any of the early users reach university?
A: About 30 per cent of the university student population has a history of early-teen alcohol and drug use. But you can start at 12, 13 or 14 and choose not to drink later on. That segment of students are the survivors; they had the resiliency to get through high school and into university. Whatever harms they’ve experienced, they’re sitting in a classroom taking this survey. There are no guarantees either way, but most people — five out of six — will come through a terrible early environment.
Q: If we wanted to reduce the use of alcohol and drugs by young people, where does it start?
A: It’s a cultural issue. It starts with nurturing, involved parenting.
Advertising is powerful; it portrays a great life that’s attached to drinking alcohol. There’s a lot of messaging that we know scientifically is very valuable, but it’s not socially acceptable because it’s a harmreduction message whose approach is not “don’t do this” but rather “here’s a safer way to do it.” For instance, a message that “two caps of MDMA is OK, but three are not;” there are ethical or moral objections to that sort of message. When I lived in Calgary there were needle drop-off boxes on the trails. I didn’t like to see those yellow boxes, but that kind of thing does work because people are terrified of needles. People get motivated to make changes when a student dies of alcohol poisoning. We can be proactive before that happens. On any campus, a lot of students have three days of classes a week. If the classes are Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday, they have four-day weekends and the illusion of a lot of free time. We could give students more assignments and more participation projects to do throughout the semester rather than one big paper due in November and another in the second semester. We could offer more to do on campus, such as keeping the phys-ed centre open late on weekends. We sell young people kegs of beer, and then when they get silly and sloppy we show up and fine them. The LCBO doesn’t need to sell 60s and 24s of beer. Knowing that debauchery spills over, we could spread out the bars rather than having one street full of them. We could keep venues a manageable size so they’re easier to police. We could make alcohol service more responsible: no happy hours, no bringing pitchers of beer to a table for one or two people. Don’t have speedy serving of alcohol but slow food service, as so many places do. Hospital visits would go down, police would be less busy.