After each drafting, we gave it out to students and said:   come back ,

and they would come back with ideas.  It was interesting; we  found that

they didn't mind too much about the alcohol as such; it was the finance

and where they were going to get it.

[College Chaplain]

Alcohol Control Strategies and Alcohol Education 

The national framework document, in line with evidence based public health

approaches to the reduction of alcohol related harm, advocated a range of

environmental control strategies, as opposed to traditional, individual

alcohol education strategies. For college staff charged with the

responsibility of devising policies incorporating such control strategies,

there are perhaps two main difficulties which  arise.  The first of these is that

it cannot be assumed that in the broader college communities there is much

familiarity with or understanding of the evaluative literature on alcohol harm

reduction or problem prevention   a literature which is unequivocal in its

conclusion that education or persuasion has only a limited role to play and

in its support for environmental control strategies.  The second difficulty is

that, lacking this grasp of the research evidence, college staff are intuitively

likely to favour educational strategies, and to regard control strategies

which challenge the accessibility and normality of alcohol on campus as

being of a kill joy or paternalistic nature.  On the whole, focus group

discussion revealed some ongoing policy controversy on these themes but

no major rejection of control strategies; as the following quotes show, staff

criticism of environmental strategies tended to be based anecdotally on

reminiscence of their own student days rather than on the research

literature: 

Sometimes we get negative feedback, probably in a humorous way, from

academic staff talking about their college days and the amount of drink

they drank   and that we  [now] have a  police  state  . You know:  

what harm did it do them; you have to have excess time and then move

on .

[Student Health Service Nurse]

Just to comment on the academics who drank when they were in college:

[they] were just a couple of pints of Guinness drinkers and not really into

the Alcopops , and they're not really aware of the Smirnoff Ice on

draught thing; and if you said any of that to them, they would be

shocked to hear of the quantities students are drinking now   they have

more  money now.  

[Student Services Administrator]

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