I’m having an extremely difficult time writing my column today. This is due, in part, to the massive hangover I’ve been nursing all day (thanks to the Herald party celebrating our crushing, but not unexpected, defeat of the Dirty Bird on the softball field Saturday).

City and university officials would say the best way to stop me from feeling this yucky and useless in future would be to further choke my ever-empty wallet by banning downtown drink specials. I am here to tell them this approach will never work.

Why? Because regulations — which deal with neither the underlying reasons behind binge-drinking, nor give students a tangible reason to change their behavior — can only relocate the problem, not solve it. Raising prices at bars won’t teach students responsibility or make them think about negative effects drinking may be have on them; the only thing such overregulation will do is encourage students to move their drinking into unsupervised house parties and dorm rooms. It’s such dangerous house parties — overcrowded and located in dilapidated houses just waiting to fall apart or burst into flames — and not bars, that cause the real problems.

Unfortunately, when it comes to downtown drinking, city and university officials don’t seem especially interested in dealing with these real problems. More interested in improving their images than encouraging students to change their behavior on a fundamental level, Chancellor Wiley and the ALRC opted for an easy out in the form of the proposed drink-special ban.

Wiley’s remarks at last week’s ALRC hearing made this all too clear. The chancellor admitted a drink-special ban would most likely cause further problems by pushing drinking into house parties. However, instead of dealing with this troubling and all-too-likely scenario, the chancellor essentially said UW and the ALRC would deal with this when it came up.

If the city and university are really interested in dealing with the dangerous effects of binge-drinking, they need to give students tangible, immediate incentives to change their behavior. Part of the solution is to provide students with a variety of entertainment options that don’t revolve solely around alcohol. Another part of the solution is to make students more aware of the negative consequences of their drinking — consequences that can extend far beyond the occasional nasty hangover.

Let’s face it — while it may ultimately be short-sighted and stupid, the majority of college students care a lot more about whether or not they’re going to pass chemistry than about the remote possibility of maybe getting liver cancer 30 years down the road. The only way to prevent binge-drinking is to give students a persuasive, pertinent reason to change their behavior. The way to do this is to show students their drinking habits hurt people in immediate, concrete ways.

Not surprisingly, there is no shortage of statistics to prove this. A highly publicized, recently published study just put out by the Harvard School of Public Health found students suffer from an abundance of alcohol-related problems.

For example: during the past year, 29.5 percent of students missed a class to drinking, 21.6 percent fell behind in schoolwork, 35 percent did something they regretted, 21.3 percent engaged in unplanned sexual activity and 26.8 percent experienced memory lapses or blacked out.

And that’s not the worst of it. Students aren’t hurting only themselves, but the people around them, as well.

For example: 29.2 percent of students living in a dorm or fraternity/sorority house were insulted or humiliated by someone who had been drinking, 15.2 percent had property damaged by someone who had been drinking, 47.6 percent had taken care of a drunken friend and 60 percent had their sleep or studying interrupted.

Statistics like these hit home. How many times have you missed class Friday morning because you were out too late or inwardly kicked yourself as you listened to someone tell you about all the ridiculous, moronic things you supposedly did the night before?

It’s studies like these, and not draconian regulations, that will change students’ drinking habits. Students won’t stop drinking just because there are no more downtown drink specials; they’ll stop drinking when they have a convincing reason to do so. Making students acknowledge that their behavior has severe, unintended and immediate consequences is the best way to make them seriously re-evaluate their drinking habits.

Let the facts speak for themselves — they are a million times more sobering than any drink-special ban could ever be.

Kristin Wieben ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science and French.