Today's Inside Higher Ed reports on concerns about possible linkages between college students' consumption of so-called energy drinks and engagement in risky behavior.
SWNID finds this discussion among the most poignantly dysfunctional on record.
It doesn't take much familiarity with the behavior of undergraduates on the typical American campus to identify the drinks most associated with students' risky behavior. For the willfully blind, these are alcoholic beverages, so commonly consumed in immoderate to dangerous quantities that the behaviors of drunkenness, with their attendant dangers, are largely accepted as normal among undergraduates. Promiscuous sex, sadistic hazing and impaired driving are among those dangerous behaviors. Alcohol poisoning is disturbingly common in institutions of higher education, as are drunken students' falls from heights or immolation in house fires. When students get plastered, they often get sick and injured. Sometimes they die.
Most campuses, however, have decided that there's nothing to be done about collegiate alcohol abuse. Few do anything meaningful to discourage it. Some actually subsidize it with college-sponsored parties. Turning the other way while students binge drink is part of the cost of doing business on just about every non-evangelical campus in America. The cost is borne by the students, both those who drink dangerously and those who live and study with them.
But the attention of this study is to the correlation between the consumption of energy drinks and risky behavior. It's like worrying about your complexion when you're dying of cancer.
3 comments:
I find that energy drinks, outside of finals week, most commonly appear as tasty sidekicks to otherwise undrinkable vodka. This proves three things: First, that SWNID is correct in his assumptions about which drinks are the real problem causers on college campuses. Second, that IHE is characteristically slow in picking up on how students are using said products. Third, that the most ridiculous characters in this story are the students who intentionally imbibe such excessive amounts of toxic liquid that it makes them think that things like jumping off of a rooftop into a swimming pool or voting for Obama is a good idea. They're not even capable of deducing that stimulants and depressants, when combined, do not indeed work together for "the ultimate high", but simply cause the drinker to drink much more before he realizes he is drunk.
Wow, is it clear that I've been at a Scottish university for a while now? Don't get me started on Irn Bru.
Some risky behaviors undoubtedly correlated with consumption of energy drinks:
1. unhealthy intervals without sleep
2. turning in assignments minutes before they are due
3. making long journeys without rest
Calus, I have to disagree with you. One does not need energy drinks, coffee, or even caffiene to participate in your 3 dangers. In fact, those three things describe most of my college career...and I did not drink caffiene after Freshman year.
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