Kristina Courtnage
Reporter

Consequences of alcohol abuse can leave a community with a collective hangover

By Kristina Courtnage

Like a drop of water ripples the surface of a pond, the effects of using drugs and alcohol are not limited to the user. When a person chooses to drink or use drugs, it has an effect on the friends, family, and community surrounding that person.

Sophomore Corey Fish had a roommate who often came back to their room drunk. He said, “He’d come in after I was asleep at one or two in the morning and he’d turn on the lights, turn on the TV, and I was like, what the heck am I supposed to do?”

While Fish said he usually left the room to study, it was difficult for him to get a good night sleep. He approached his RA about the problem who talked with his roommate, but was unsuccessful in resolving the conflict.

Fish said his roommate eventually got alcohol poisoning and was taken to the hospital. Fish said he was grilled by a police officer at the emergency room who thought he also might have been drinking.

While Campus Pastor Dennis Sepper said the majority of PLU students drink responsibly, he said there is a small percentage that don’t, and these are the ones we hear about and remember.

Most regular partygoers can tell the story of at least one person being taken to the hospital after drinking too much too fast.

Sophomore David Rose said he and his friends called the paramedics for a friend after she drank 12 shots in 10 minutes. “She got really cold and chilled, and was throwing up. They took her to the hospital,” he said.

Rose said his group of friends try to look out for each other. “If one of our friends does drink more than their usual and it concerns us we let them know. The last thing we want is to have something fun turn into something bad,” he said.

Sepper said this is the best step to take initially when the person is no longer intoxicated. “Let the person know how their behavior affected you and the greater community,” he said. Sepper said this step takes trust and strength but is necessary to make the person aware of their behavior.

Director of Counseling and Testing, Gary Minetti, said individuals are affected by drinking in various ways and for various reasons. “If not from a background where alcohol is a part of life, it may interfere with the lifestyle he or she wants,” he said.

This may especially cause conflict in roommate situations. Minetti said a roommate’s drinking can disturb sleep, study, and other social activities they want to do in the room. “The person is paying to live in that room and they have rights also,” Minetti said. “In some cases, they find another roommate.”

In addition to alcohol, using drugs also has an effect on the community of the user. Sepper said drugs affect the body differently than alcohol, and often make the user more introverted, whereas alcohol makes them more extroverted.

This does not, however, limit the impact on the person’s community. Sepper said people using drugs may alienate themselves off from friends and family. “We’re created for community and everything we do has communal ramifications,” Sepper said.

The problems are magnified when someone has an addiction. Sepper said, “When there is an addiction a person is willing to sacrifice their relationships in order to obtain the object the are addicted to.”

When junior Kelly Davis was 9 years old, she woke herself up in the morning, made herself instant breakfast, woke her mother up who had fallen asleep on the couch the night before, and made her promise not to drink during work. “The roles were reversed,” Davis said about the effects of her mother’s alcoholism. “I was the mom, she was the child.”

Davis said her mother was often late picking her up from school and there were many times she drove home drunk.

Things finally changed for Davis after her mother’s boyfriend threatened her mother by holding a butcher knife to her throat, but ended up cutting himself with a razor. Her mother was arrested on the suspicion that she assaulted her boyfriend. The occurrence caused friends and relatives to intervene and her mother enrolled in a recovery program.

Davis attended Al-Anon and Alateen meetings, support groups for families of alcoholics, and eventually her parents, who had separated because of her mother’s addiction, renewed their vows on Davis’s 13th birthday.

Her mother has been sober for more than 10 years, and recently got a job as a flight attendant. “There are times life’s really stressful for her,” Davis said, “but she says she’ll never start drinking again.”

Davis said her mother’s alcoholism caused her to grow up faster than other children. “I didn’t have a parent saying ‘Do your homework,’” she said.

Davis said she never wants to repeat her mother’s experiences. “Alcoholism ripped my family apart,” she said. “I know there are better ways to deal with feelings than to drink them away.”

Freshman Josh St. Jacques is familiar with the havoc that alcoholism caused for his mother’s family and this has made him cautious about using alcohol. “I don’t view it as positively or easygoing as some of my friends do,” he said.

Minetti said the effects of alcohol on relationships are especially apparent in dating relationships where one partner drinks or gets drunk often, but the other does not.

Junior Solveig Berg said she was in a long-term relationship with a boyfriend who was an alcoholic and became verbally abusive when intoxicated. “I always tried to get him to stop drinking,” she said. Berg said she eventually started drinking with her boyfriend before gaining enough courage to break off the relationship.

Sepper said it is important to realize that one person’s actions can and do affect the community. “None of us is a self-secluded individual,” he said. “Part of being a mature individual is knowing things we do affect others.”