The Stupid Drink is not my original idea, although Lord knows I've downed my share of idiocy. Instead, it comes from students at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, who coined the term in their winning entry in this year's National Student Advertising Competition.
Their assignment: Develop a campaign to combat dangerous overconsumption of alcohol by college students.
Overconsumption is a big deal on college campuses these days. Freshmen undergo lengthy, often overwrought orientation about the evils of alcohol that invariably equate beer with alcoholism, crime and death.
What caught my eye about the Stupid Drink is - though it's targeted at underage drinkers - it doesn't preach abstinence.
Professor Edward Russell, the faculty adviser who worked with the students, explained "that's because we know the abstinence message doesn't work . . . It's been tried many times by well-meaning people, and the problem keeps getting bigger."
Moreover, the campaign willfully rejects the B-word: binge.
When the Syracuse advertising team surveyed their campus, fellow students laughed at the term because, under its common definition (five drinks for men, four for women in two hours), virtually everyone they know is a binge drinker.
Yet they all know overdrinking when they see (or feel) it. There's a line that's crossed, they agreed, and it's different for every drinker. It may be a feeling, a situation, an environment, a number or a specific form of alcohol.
That's the Stupid Drink.
The problem for students is recognizing their own Stupid Drink before taking that decisive sip.
"It seems to take three or four years for students to figure out where that line is," Russell said. "The big idea is: How do you shorten that learning curve, to be safe as quickly as possible, to maybe six months?"
