Students, Please Drink Sensibly

Memories of my freshers week back in 2007 are somewhat blurry. The reason for this is no surprise, the volume of alcohol consumed in those seven short days was more than i'd ever consumed before. What with the freedom of living away from home, the need to bond with new flat mate, (which of course needs to be done whilst under the influence) having only a little preliminary work to do ( "it doesn't matter in the first year, anyway" was everyones favorite rhetoric) and lots of (seemingly) free cash injected into my bank account all contributed to freshers being spent in a gloriously hazy state. Thankfully, I have been able to piece together some 'memories' of those nights out thanks to the colossal number of photographs that were taken, and subsequently uploaded and tagged on Facebook. We went out almost every night that week, and the one night that I opted not to go 'clubbing' (my friends were going to a school uniform themed fancy dress disco for goodness sake) I got the impression that I was being quite anti-social. I remember as freshers we were encouraged to go out and get drunk as often as we possibly could; every bar and club was vying for our attention, and everywhere you went people were pushing leaflets in your face promoting some bangin' night out, with 'freshers deals' ie cheap drinks. There was almost a sense that you were expected to get paralytic, with brownie points going to those who could tell the most amusing/disgusting story about what happened last night at so-an-so's. It got to be a competition. I even recall some students who had never touched alcohol in their lives due to religious commitments, suddenly abandoning their faith in favour of peer pressure, and getting blindingly drunk in order to fit in and act like a 'proper fresher'.

Freshers week has now been dubbed 'freshers fortnight', which makes for some delightful alliteration, but also doubles the length of time that your liver and your bank balance take a pounding before university work begins, putting the brakes on the extensive socialising a little bit.

But with such so much encouragement from bars, clubs and fellow students to get drunk, promoting the common message that alcohol is a prerequisite for a good time, what is being done to encourage responsible drinking? Well there is always the tiny voice at the back of your mind that tells you you'll regret it later, but that voice rarely wins. So what else is there out there that gives students the idea that drinking doesn't necessarily equal fun? The government always seem to be commissioning new advertising campaigns to inform us about the amount of units we should consume or the consequences of too much alcohol, but this voice always seems to get drowned out by the barrage of other contradictory messages aimed at students. The latest such campaign, launched to coincide with freshers fortnight, is plastered on phoneboxes all over the place, and looks a little bit like this:

The latest Drink Aware campaign, encouraging us to choose soft drinks instead of alcohol

The adverts, which remind us of some tempting alternatives to alcohol, take a different approach to previous campaigns, such as the 'Too much alcohol makes you feel invincible' and 'You wouldn't start a night like this...' campaigns which show the consequences of having too much to drink, instead focusing on how to prevent getting excessively drunk in the first place. However, the second advert doesn't look like an anti-drink campaign at all, if you walk past this in the street it looks like just another generic Coca-Cola advert. There are a couple more adverts in the campaign, which can be viewed over at the Drink Aware website, but I can't help feel that such messages are too subtle; they're not attention grabbing or hard hitting like previous campaigns, and certainly don't think it'll be enough to convince this years batch of freshers to go steady on the alcohol.