As of October 2009, UMass’s Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students (BASICS) program received national recognition for its services on campus to reduce the amount of binge drinking. While officials agree that the BASICS program has been successful in their efforts, there seems to be a discrepancy on campus.
UMass statistics show that in the three-year span since BASICS was implemented there has been a 38-percent reduction in binge drinking, a 26-percent decline in frequent binge drinking and a 14-percent drop in underage binge drinking. However, as recent as the weekend of September 18th there was a record high of 48 emergency calls in the area, over half of which were related to alcohol abuse.
Those emergency calls may be an isolated incident, but there still seems to be a division between the perception and the reality of the BASICS program.
Chris * a UMass sophomore, recalls of his BASICS experience as ” a waste of time and money”. Chris says that he was more or less a victim or circumstance. ” I wasn’t doing anything any other college aged student would be doing on a Saturday night, the only thing was, I got caught, and because of it, I now had to spend $100 and two hours listening to information that I already know.”
According to the BASICS website the program involves “two 50-minute sessions. During the first, you’ll complete an online questionnaire and meet with a prevention specialist. At the second session, you and your prevention specialist will discuss your questionnaire, compare your results to other UMass Amherst students and explore ways to reduce your risks.”
For those who voluntarily attend BASICS the workshop is free. However, the majority of participants are judicially sanctioned and thus they have to pay either $100 if it’s for his or her first offense or $175 if its for his or her second. This money is used towards purchasing gift certificates as incentives for students to participate in BASIC surveys, which they use for the bulk of their information.
The information BASICS uses is all UMass based and the program relies heavily on comparing an individuals drinking to the drinking of those who reply to the survey.
Danny King, a UMass senior and survey participant says, “I always answer them because I get a free gift card, but I don’t always answer those things honestly because I just never trust that they are anonymous, so I always downplay my drinking.”
King also said that he believed that typically students who would take the time out and be motivated enough to complete an alcohol survey probably aren’t the students who are heavily drinking anyways.
Taking into account that there are students like King out there, one must wonder how much error is within these statistics.
This year the BASICS program is promoting its “social norm” campaign to show that “people believe most UMass students are drinking a lot, a lot of the time, when in fact, the majority drink moderately, if at all.”
When sharing this information with some UMass students they seemed to believe otherwise.
Jaxie Meth, a UMass Junior said, ” BASICS always finds a weird way of making it seem like no ones drinking. Last year the posters said 3 out of 4 UMass students know how to have fun without drinking, and the truth is yeah, we know how to but it doesn’t mean we’re going to.”
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- UMASS Junior, Jaxie Meth, seen catching up on some work after an eventful weekend.
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- Seen above is the popular drinking game- Dizzy Bat played at a UMass tailgate
Despite some negative feedback, the BASICS program must be doing something right to garnish such attention as a Science and Service Award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), an honor to which only four college programs total have been awarded.
Binge drinking is a problem you encounter on any University campus, and while it may never be removed completely from our school, something must be said for the effort to make UMass a safer and healthier environment for students.
* Chris asked that I use a different name to keep his anonymity from taking the program because he does not want do be seen in a negative light.
