Lisa, standing at 5’8” with an athletic build, considers a night of heavy drinking for her to be “eight or more drinks.”

“What a lot of women don’t understand,” says Mackay-Smith, “is that not only does a female’s body mass differ from a man’s, but the response time to her alcohol consumption is generally different from her male counterpart. That means that even after a woman has stopped drinking, her physiological response to the alcohol she’s consumed continues.”

Helping to raise awareness about the dangers of high-risk drinking among college students is Phoenix House. For more than 40 years, Phoenix House has been combating drug and alcohol abuse across the country by operating more than 100 residential and outpatient treatment facilities in nine states.

Their website, www.phoenixhouse.org, lists some “sobering statistics,” such as:

  • The average college student spends $900 a year on alcohol, and less than half that amount on books;
  • 159,000 of today’s freshmen college students will drop out of school next year due to alcohol- or other drug-related problems;
  • A night of heavy drinking can impair your ability to think abstractly for up to a month afterward;
  • 300,000 of today’s students will eventually die alcohol-related deaths, including diseases and car accidents.