Koren Zailckas, The Author Of Smashed: Story Of A Drunken

On a wet, dark, and snowy Sunday night an outsider wouldn't expect a Northeastern University campus bar to be crowded. In fact, most students can't even leave their dorms because there is too much snow. Yet a tiny pub, located barely off campus on Gainesboro Street, is packed wall to wall with students. A small community is drinking away their problems while discussing the probability of school being canceled. Many experts would describe this act as binge drinking, but any student would prefer to describe it as just a regular Sunday night.

Drinking on college campuses has become a huge problem. For example, in the 10th century only old people used to drink, but now students drink more than their parents. Students see their parents drinking, so they may think that drinking has no effect on health that anyone can drink so why can’t the students drink? Therefore, college students have been drinking alcohol since the 14th century. Barrett Seaman’s article “How Bingeing Became the New College Sport,” appearing in TIME magazine on August 29, 2005, explains how binge drinking is affecting college students. It also suggests that lowering the drinking age might help solve the problem of binge drinking. This article has much information on how and where students get drunk.

Wechsler takes on a more educational approach with statistics such as, “86 percent of college students drink” (Wechsler para. 8). Within the first few paragraphs, the researcher on alcohol and drug abuse expands his knowledge on college binge drinking and suggests that, “Parents who pay for college tuitions should demand a safe environment for their children” (Wechsler para. 11). Wechsler provides answers as to why college drinking is not widely acknowledged.

In Henry Wechsler’s, “Getting Serious about Eradicating Binge Drinking”, he discusses the issue of binge drinking. Binge drinking is an extensive problem on college campuses. The majority of colleges merely focus on the student, rather than what encourages students to drink. Fraternities, sororities, and athletics are huge sources of the students on campus who drink. There are many approaches colleges can take to decrease the problem, and many colleges are already getting a head start. It is also important to not ignore how often colleges indirectly encourage students to drink (20).

“From the moment freshmen set foot on campus, they are steeped in a culture that encourages them to drink, and drink heavily. At many schools, social life is still synonymous with alcohol-lubricated gatherings” (Cohen). Binge drinking is a huge aspect of the culture of college life; many college students binge drink to become socially accepted in a particular group. Binge drinking is not only

In today’s society, alcohol has become one of the main necessities for people to create relaxation, confidence, and the ability to be social. In the short story “A Bartender Tells What Man Did to Booze, and Booze to Man”, an anonymous bartender gives an up close and personal account of his observations about the effects alcohol has on men. He emphasizes the change in their character after a few drinks. Koren Zailckas from Smashed shares a memoir of her life describing her relationship with alcohol abuse and the problems that it caused for her. Although certain types of alcohol are used to support good health, it is the excessive consumption and misuse that leaves people dependent resulting in significant social, physical, and mental

“80 percent of teen-agers have tried alcohol, and that alcohol was a contributing factor in the top three causes of death among teens: accidents, homicide and suicide” (Underage, CNN.com pg 3). Students may use drinking as a form of socializing, but is it really as good as it seems? The tradition of drinking has developed into a kind of “culture” fixed in every level of the college student environment. Customs handed down through generations of college drinkers reinforce students' expectation that alcohol is a necessary ingredient for social success. These perceptions of drinking are the going to ruin the lives of the students because it will lead to the development alcoholism. College students who drink a lot, while in a college

I decided to write my final paper on Koren Zailckas Smashed: A Story of a Drunken Girlhood. A memoir based on a young 14 year old girl who drinks for the first time with her friend Natalie before a birthday party. Her experiences with alcohol doesn’t stop there. We learn that she gets her stomach pumped at age 16, and at age 22, wakes up in an apartment in New York City unsure of where she is, because of alcohol. After this, she realizes that she has a problem and that she needs help. I chose this book as the topic of underage drinking and alcohol abuse is constantly rising in our society today. It is a problem that many youth kids are facing, and this book perfectly describes a young girls story about her addiction with alcohol and the many poor decisions she makes.

Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood is Koren Zailckas' account of life as an alcoholic. It traces her life from her first drink, when she was fourteen, to her last, at twenty-two; Smashed chronicles Zailckas' struggle with alcohol abuse, in an effort to explain the binge drinking phenomenon that plagues America's youth.

We knocked on the door of the off-campus apartment, as it opened we were confronted with the heavy stench of alcohol. A young girl was passed out on the living room floor, a pile of empty beer cans filled the kitchen sink, and the deafening music rattled the window panes. A group of girls managed to stumble past us. They waved goodbye to the host, who was handing drinks to me and my sister. It was not my first time drinking. In fact, everyone there was quite experienced – after all, it’s college. Half of the guests were completely drunk, and I had no problem with it. That is, until later that night when my sister locked herself in a room with a guy she had met only a week before. This prompted me to seriously consider the effects of

The consumption of alcohol as a habitual behavior has long been associated with the American collegiate experience, despite the many known negative consequences a student who partakes in drinking can encounter. Because of the danger drunken students pose to a college’s reputation and the safety of its surrounding areas, much research has been done concerning the collegiate party and drinking scenes. This research mostly studied the demographics of the student body, so strategies developed to curtail the illegal or overconsumption of alcohol could be targeted towards the specific groups that demonstrated the highest likelihood of participating in these acts. When the strategies were implemented, however, there was little decline in the number of college students who chose to party and drink (Vander Ven 2011). This failure did not point toward a flaw in the research data, but instead a lack of research into the benefits a collegiate drinker receives that are rewarding to the point he or she cannot resist. This is the topic of Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard by Thomas Vander Ven.

Research has supported the observation that young people in America consume alcohol regularly; this prevalence of use increases rapidly during adolescence, as well as a few years afterward (Wagenaar and Wolfson 37). This has come to be a problem among college students. It has been shown through extensive quantitative and qualitative research that those under twenty-one years of age are able to obtain alcohol, which allows them to binge drink. Binge drinking holds many problems for college students: alcohol poisoning, DUIs, traffic accidents, and even fatalities.

There are many definitions associated with alcohol and alcohol abuse in general that need to be clarified. Most college students think of alcohol as that cheap high they get to obtain on the weekends at social events called parties. Knowing what alcohol really is and what exactly it can do to your body in excessive amounts over time and in any one sitting is one of the main problems with why college students abuse alcohol. The social norm of binge or excessive drinking in college is prevailing over the social fact of what alcohol really is and what it can do to a person’s health! The actual definition of alcohol is a “liquid distilled product of fermented fruits, grains, and vegetables used as a solvent, antiseptic and sedative” (Drinking: A students Guide,

First, there are seventy percent of college students, who consumed alcohol beverages in the last thirty days. Also, there are half of the college students, who are binge drinkers on campus. They attend to drink a lot in a short time period. The students imply drinking is part of campus culture and traditions, which resembles of rite of passage and independence.

In another study done by Stephen Porter and John Pryor (2007), they related the number of drinks per week to time management and grades by separating the groups into gender and school type. Women typically seemed to spend less time drinking, especially at all women’s schools or research universities, than men at any kind of university. For the students who did seem to engage in heavier drinking, the smaller amount