DRINKING AT GEORGETOWN GU Urges Students To Celebrate With Caution on 21st Birthdays By Charlotte Nichols Hoya Staff Writer

Students gearing up to celebrate their first night of legal drinking receive an unlikely birthday card these days. Well aware of the notorious and dangerous reputation of 21st birthday celebration binge drinking, Georgetown University has been mixing congratulations with a timely health warning.

Health Education Services mails a birthday card reading “You’re turning 21 . CELEBRATE!” to every student at Georgetown just before their birthday. The inside of the card continues, “We want you to turn 22 . celebrate responsibly!”

“Twenty-one is a very interesting time in our culture in terms of celebrating that rite of passage. This significant birthday is linked to doing 21 shots in celebration,” Health Education Services Director Patrick Kilcarr said. “It’s not about students not going out and drinking, it’s about awareness of what they’re going to do. It’s more of an issue of harm reduction and being safe,” he said.

The 1,600 cards mailed throughout the university last year were intended to remind students to be safe while celebrating, especially in a culture with a “heavy shot ritual,” Kilcarr said.

Kilcarr emphasized that the program is not aimed at stopping alcohol consumption; but rather to stop students from getting too “caught up in the moment” when friends are buying them birthday drinks that “taste like candy.”

Costing about $3,500 a year, the cards are purchased from an organization called Be Responsible About Drinking. BRAD was founded by Cindy and John McCue after their son, Bradley, died of alcohol poisoning after celebrating his 21st birthday at Michigan State University. The inside of each birthday card features a picture of Bradley and a brief description of his story, along with Cindy and John’s signatures.

“It violates privacy laws for universities to give us a list of birthdays, so the cards have to actually be distributed by the universities,” Cindy said.

Georgetown is one of 55 schools participating in the program.

BRAD is a six-member organization with a goal to “distribute information about alcohol poisoning in general,” Cindy said. “Alcohol can be dangerous in quantity and just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s safe if you’ve had too much.”

Like the university’s Health Education Services, B.R.A.D. doesn’t focus on saying “don’t drink.” Rather, their mission statement emphasizes education and imparting information “that will encourage and enable responsible decision making concerning alcohol.”

For example, a wallet insert is included with every birthday card, which provides information on how to recognize the signs of alcohol poisoning and how to medically deal with the situation appropriately.

“I think it’s beneficial because there’s this idea that you have to go out and get plastered on your 21st, which most people do, and this gives you tips on how to be safe,” Co-chair of the Harm Reduction Group and GUSA President Ryan DuBose (COL ’02) said. “They’re trying to keep people from doing harm to [themselves] and others.”