A Difficult Struggle
Last weekend one of the top news stories on the Yahoo! News page had the headline:

Wis. town struggles to prevent drownings

It was a story about the college/river city of La Crosse, Wisconsin, sitting along the beauty and power of the Mississippi. The article started out with the basic facts:

Searchers combing the Mississippi River this month pulled out the body of basketball player Luke Homan — the eighth college-age man in nine years to disappear from a city tavern and turn up dead in a river.

La Crosse officials have debated for years how to keep drunken students safe, but some say there may be no answer for a town with three colleges, three rivers and $3 pitchers of beer.

"I'm not sure anything we do can prevent a future tragedy," Mayor Mark Johnsrud said.

La Crosse isn't alone. We have had an epidemic of such deaths along the Upper Mississippi from La Crosse on up to St. Cloud, Minnesota with the Twin Cities in between.

In La Crosse they are debating issues of building a barrier which would close off the beauty of a naturally beautiful riverfront- or putting motion sensor lights- or who knows what else. Nor do they want to send out the message to prospective college students that La Crosse is a mecca for binge drinking.

For a number of years there was fear that some kind of serial killer has been stalking drunk college students. In a sense there has been- the serial killer of binge drinking. Minnesota and Wisconsin rank right up there as the top binge drinking states. Even alcoholism counselors know we have such a culture. We know that the standard definition of a binge evening is 4-5 drinks in one evening which is simply just another good Friday Night Fish Fry.

Meanwhile, the mayor said, community groups need to keep warning students about the dangers of binge drinking, he said.

"It's a behavior issue," he said. "People are going to do what they want to do."

Mary Torstveit, assistant director of prevention services at the University of Wisconsin, said students living off-campus are largely on their own.

Drinking "just seems to be such a standard part of Wisconsin culture and La Crosse culture. We'll always be fighting that," she said. "At some point, we have to start working on personal responsibility. That's probably the biggest thing. You can't have somebody looking out for you your whole life."

It is truly scary. Somewhere along the line there is a message that isn't getting through because it is being countered by stronger cultural messages. We have spent a lot of money and publicity on the "Meth Epidempic" trying to prevent death and pollution. Yet we often look the other way when the granddady of all mood-altering chemicals claims more and more victims.