by Stanton Peele

About the author: Stanton Peele is a psychologist and researcher specializing in drug and alcohol addiction and the author of The Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control.

“Efforts to curb excessive drinking on college campuses fall short,” newspaper headlines screamed. Henry Wechsler, director of the College Alcohol Studies Program at the Harvard School of Public Health, has been studying binge drinking on U.S. campuses since 1993. By 1999, he found, the percentage of student who frequently binged had not declined, but increased, as had the number of abstainers.

This split or alternation between abstinence and binge drinking is an old one. It is characteristic of cultures which view alcohol as a tempting evil. From...