From cheers to beers to Bourbon

We gather by the thousands — students, alumni, just folks — to cheer University of Iowa teams. We’re happy when they win, sad when they lose. Either way, many students head off at games end for a drinking party. They go from cheers to beers and bourbon.

For most freshmen, drinking is a new sport. Eager to fit in, they have an introductory drink and then more and more.

Here, about 40 percent of students, down from 70 percent just 10 years ago, end up drinking in a high-risk manner. Some remain problem drinkers and there would be even more without the staff dedicated to implementing the UI’s Alcohol Harm Reduction Plan. The plan uses the National Institutes of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse framework that focuses on both individual interventions and environmental change, including laws, policies, and ordinances. It is emotionally draining work and requires a kind of dedication most of us never have to make at our work. They save lives.

I have had two friends die of alcoholism. Both had one drink too many — possibly their first one, certainly their final one. One was a former first lady of Minnesota and 62 years old. When her husband became ambassador to Iceland, she went quickly from a diplomatic drinker to an addicted one. Later, she also went from a detox center, seemingly successfully dry, to her death in a one-car rollover. She began that day with no thought of danger and certainly not of death. She was simply going to visit family in Texas.

The other victim was not yet 20, home alone in a small Minnesota town, parents off for a couple days of fishing. They came home to a dead son with an empty glass on the floor. He died not peacefully in his sleep, as the cliché goes, but drunk, poisoned by alcohol.

They both lived years filled with pain for themselves and family. They were not alone. One study of alcoholism says: “It is estimated that more than 140,000 people (approximately 97.000 men and 43,000 women) die from alcohol related causes annually.”

We have our share of alcoholics in Iowa, and we don’t need more. When the governor and the Republican Senate put a glass of alcohol in the hands of a teenager, even as “just a server,” they are signing the death warrant for some. Death and mourning ought not to be sponsored by the state as we have done here. Some of those “servers” will become drunks on the way to troubled years and possibly early death.

We ought to discourage drinking which turns into a problem of alcoholism for some of those at tailgate parties. For years, we have devoted tax money to deal with alcoholism or the threat of it. It is an important expenditure that could have been less.

I wish the Governor had talked to university faculty and staff who spend much of their time helping kids who otherwise are on their way not to graduation, but on their way to besotted failure, not just at school, but for a lifetime. A Bachelor of Alcoholism is not a degree worth earning. The governor should talk to the people at UI for guidance and counseling before another student dies.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”