Alcohol Consumption In College Essay

Alcohol consumption on college campuses continues to be a persistent public health concern. Alcohol is the most widely used drug on college campuses, with 86% of students reporting consuming it within the last year, and 45% of students consuming it weekly or more frequently (Presley & Meilman, 1992). More recent data indicates that approximately 32% of college students engage in “binge” drinking (Johnston et al., 2016), defined as 4 or more drinks consumed in one sitting for females (or 5 drinks for males) (Wechsler, Dowdall, Davenport & Rimm, 1995). Increased alcohol consumption may yield several adverse consequences, including impaired academic performance, “blackouts”, physical injuries or illness, unintended sexual activity, impaired driving, fights, or sexual violence (Perkins, 2002). College students may be at an especially increased risk for adverse …show more content…
Findings indicate that typically, at low costs, alcohol demand is insensitive or inelastic (Amlung et al., 2012; Berman & Martinetti, 2017; Gentile et al., 2012; Murphy & MacKillop, 2006). In other words, at lower prices, there is not a significant change in reported purchasing and consumption across similar price ranges. However, as costs increase, demand becomes increasingly sensitive, or elastic, and consumption decreases (Hursh & Roma, 2016). Recently, hypothetical purchase tasks (HPT), such as the alcohol purchase task (APT; Murphy & MacKillop, 2006), have enabled the study of alcohol demand in college students without the considerable ethical and logistic challenges of “real” purchases (Amlung et al., 2012; Kaplan & Reed, 2018). In addition, probability purchase tasks have been used to study alcohol-related, but “one-time” purchases, such as fake IDs (Foster et al., in