UNC Launching New Policy Treating Alcohol Abuse as Public Health Issue

UNC is implementing a new policy dealing with alcohol and substance abuse across the campus.

Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Winston Crisp told the Board of Trustees University Affairs Committee that this effort was focusing on a particularly dangerous form of alcohol use, which Crisp called “high-risk drinking.”

“We’re not talking about underage drinking, sneaking a beer,” Crisp said. “We’re not talking about having a couple of drinks.

“We’re talking about drinking for the sole purpose of getting drunk.”

John Sauls is the Dean of Students at UNC and is leading the 26-member working group studying substance abuse on campus. He said the last time the issue was studied at Carolina was the mid-90s, when Sauls himself was a new alumnus.

“We recognized that the advent of high-risk dangerous drinking, the amounts that people drink, the availability of alcohol had really changed generationally,” Sauls said. “So we had to think about some of those things as we tackled it, and we organized these five major areas.”

Those five areas of focus for the new policy are education, prevention, intervention, accountability and treatment and recovery. Sauls said this model focuses more on alcohol and substance abuse as a public health issue rather than a law enforcement issue.

“Historically, campuses have tried to cite their ways out of this problem,” Sauls said. “[Thinking] if you just had more discipline, more efforts to give people citations, then perhaps that would curb the problem. All of the data nationally tells us that is not accurate.”

Sauls said UNC is in a unique position because of the availability of alcohol near campus.

“Within a two-mile radius of where we are, there are over 50 establishments that sell or serve alcohol,” Sauls said. “We are in an alcohol-dense environment, which is very much a factor in contributing to the overall environment.”

The meeting was being held one day after the one-year anniversary of a wrong-way crash on I-85 in Orange County that left three people dead. The car going the wrong way on the interstate was being driven by Chandler Kania – a 20-year-old UNC student at the time whose blood-alcohol content the night of the crash was .17, twice the legal limit to drive in North Carolina.

Sauls and Crisp said the university, the Town of Chapel Hill, Orange County and state officials are working together to tackle the issue of binge or high-risk drinking.

One innovative portion of the potential solution is hiring a clinical substance abuse counselor, which UNC is doing. Crisp said a “good portion” of the money to fund that new position was coming from the North Carolina Alcohol Law Enforcement agency.

The new policy is also comprehensive, meaning that it not only applies to students but everyone in the campus community. The new policy will go into effect on August 1.

A new website – alcohol.unc.edu – was also launched as part of this effort.

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