A Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study (1999) found that 44 percent of all college students "binge drink," defined as regularly consuming four or five drinks in a short space of time in order to get drunk. The survey also discovered that members of fraternities or sororities were four times more likely to be binge drinkers than were other students. White students were twice as likely to binge drink as were members of minority groups'. Among those who identified themselves as binge drinkers, 30 percent reported engaging in unplanned sexual activity as a result of their drinking. One student in five reported that they abandoned safe-sex practices when drunk.

The increase in binge drinking coincided with the rise in the legal drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one. To the under-twenty-one college crowd, it was like a mini-Prohibition in full swing. Some people have argued...