Opinion

Dealing with downtown drinking

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To date, campus anti-binge-drinking efforts have lacked coordination among the three affected groups — UW and city officials, the bar industry and, most importantly, students. We hope that will change this semester.

In a welcome (and heretofore unseen) effort to listen to student concerns, Alcohol License and Review Committee chair Tim Bruer met with the Herald editorial board last week to discuss his proposals to standardize downtown alcohol prices and ban drink specials. While we disagreed with plenty of Bruer’s proposals, including his plan to ban drink specials, we found much common ground. Most notably, we agreed with Bruer’s vision for a safer campus drinking environment, full of entertainment options and a more diverse selection of bars.

Some of the underlying causes of campus binge-drinking are unsolvable, especially UW’s binge-drinking reputation, which draws thousands of party-ready freshmen every fall. But there are some very simple, very immediate actions the city, university and student body can take to make downtown drinking safer.

First and foremost, alternatives to drinking should be better publicized.

Secondly, weekend entertainment should extend beyond movies and bars — the university should ante up and subsidize more live entertainment.

Third, University Health Services and the RWJ Foundation — two well funded anti-drinking organizations — should be more up-front and honest in putting out the facts about student drinking. UW’s self-perpetuating drinking reputation is overstated; other schools have demonstrated that publicizing the truth about students’ actual drinking habits will lessen peer pressure, encourage alternatives and help students self-monitor their habits.

Finally, regulations on entertainment venues should be crafted with an eye towards making new venues financially viable. Currently venues are forced to choose between underagers — i.e. a no-alcohol event — or else compete with bars for the overage crowd. Far better would be a wristband system for entertainment venues. Underagers would have an entertainment option, while overagers need not choose between alcohol and entertainment.

All these options could have a positive impact on downtown drinking. It’s time the city, university, bar industry and students worked together on concrete plans instead of unilateral overregulation.