Those statistics come from student surveys and students don’t always tell the truth on the questionnaires, even though they’re done anonymously, they said.

“It’s a survey,” Olson said. “I lie on surveys.”

All three said they had their first alcoholic drink when they were freshmen in high school, or about 15 years old. That fits with reports from police and college administrators, who say many of the students who do drink alcohol when they first arrive on campus already are experienced drinkers.

When asked how many drinks were too many during one night of partying, Cumm, Anderson and Olson said it’s definitely time to stop when you hit “double digits.”

“As soon as you cross that nine or 10 level, it’s too much,” Olson said.

“It seems like, now, it’s completely acceptable to get tanked,” Anderson said. “I think you should definitely learn your limits before you go to college. Then what happened to those girls (Jax and Amen-Reif) wouldn’t happen.”

All three of the men said Jax had to have been an inexperienced drinker to hit the blood-alcohol concentration level she did.

Experts, such as Sharon Rhoades of the Brown County Evaluation Center, say that isn’t true. Someone has to be a very experienced drinker with a high tolerance for alcohol to reach anything close to .46 BAC without vomiting or passing out first, Rhoades said. Most people are in need of constant attention at a detoxification center if their BAC is half that, she said.

On the rise

Detox staff and others, including Mankato police officers, have noted a trend of rising BAC levels among young people who are arrested and sent to detox. What was once uncommon, levels hitting the .25 mark and above, are now a regular occurrence.

What seems to be happening with young people and alcohol now isn’t anything new to two other MSU students who have “been there and done that.” Joe Petersen, 53, and Phillip Buzzard, 45, are both recovering alcoholics and non-traditional students enrolled in the university’s Drug and Alcohol Studies program.

This is Petersen’s fourth try at being a college student. He was a student at Michigan State from 1973 to 1975 and Bemidji State from 1975 to 1976 before he decided to take time off. Petersen then became a “vegetarian non-drinker” while he tended bar and took classes at Washington State from 1977 to 1979.

“When I was in college, the drinking age went from 21 to 18 on June 1, 1973, because of the Vietnam War,” Petersen said. “We used to have keggers on our dorm floor every weekend. There was lots of binge drinking going on all the time right on campus. I was a straight-A student, then my grades were going down hill because I was partying all the time.

“We’d get a keg and sit around and drink it until it was gone. If we ran out of beer and could still walk, we’d probably go to a bar and drink a few pitchers between three or four of us. You drank until you were absolutely sloshed.”

Back then, Petersen said he had a perception everyone drank. He said he realizes now it’s actually a small percentage of people who are binge drinking, but those people get the most attention because “they do the stupid things.” Everyone remembers the guy who gets “hammered” at parties, but no one remembers all of the other people walking around with a beer but not drunk.