Young people are boozing like never before. Sometimes it leaves them more than messed up or passed out. Sometimes it gives new meanint to the term "dead drunk."

Twenty-year-old Been Wynne had good reason to celebrate the night of Monday, August 25th, 1997. A transfer student new to Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, he'd just received a bid to join a prestdgious fraternity.

Around 5 p.m., he joined his frat brothers at an off-campus party.Later, they hit a bar less than half a mile from the university. What happened next was anything but a cause for celebration. Some witnesses claim the underage pledges were guzzling pitchers of Three Wise Men, a potent drink normally served in shots. Others report seeing passed-out partiers wheeled from the part to their cars in supermarket shopping carts.

Around midnight, someone at the frat house called police. When paramedics arrived, Benn had stopped breathing and was in full cardiac arrest. he and three frat brothers were taken to the hospital, suffering from actue alcohol poisoning. The others survived; Ben did not. He was pronounced dead less than eight hours after the partying began. Students, especially those who knew been well, were stunned. He was just a normal guy who liked to drink, said a friend who was with him that night. He drank as much as anybody else.


YOU BOOZE, YOU LOSE

What happened to Ben could have happened to any student on almost any campus in America. Henry Wechsler, PH.D., at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Mass., studied more than 17,000 undergrads at 140 colleges and universities in the United States and found nearly half (44%) were binge drinkers.

For guys, "binge drinking" refers to downing five or more drinks in a row, one or more times in a two-week period. For women it means four drinks (since females absorb alcohol differently). Basically, binge drinking means just tossing back one after the other. Despite the stereotype of wild frat boys just guzzling liquor, bing drinking isn't just a college thing, as thses stats from the National High School Senior Survey, conductied by the University of Michigan, and the U.S. Surgeon General Show:

** During the two weeks before the survey was conducted, 27.5 percent of the high school seniors admitted to binge drinking
** Two-thirds of eighth graders and nearly nine tenths of 12th graders have tried alcohol; 25 percent of eighth graders and half of the 12th graders used alcohol in the month prior to the survey.

** More than 40 percent of teens who admit drinking say they drink when they're upset; 31 percent say they drink alone; 25 percent drink when they're bored; 25 percent drink to "get high."

If the numbers sound impersonal, consider what happened the night Kimberly Reardon from Upstate New York drank almost a full bottle of Goldschlager. Kimberly, 13 at the time, was so wasted she lost consciousness--and her friends were too scared to call 911. Luckily, Kimberly's parents found her and called an ambulance; on the way to the hospital, she went into cardiac arrest. She had her stomach pumped and had to be hooked up to a respirator because she couldn't breathe.

"The police told me my blood alcohol level was .59, which can cause death," Kimberly wrote in an article about her experience for The Buffalo News. "Some of you probably never heard of alcohol being a killer. I didn't before this happened to me."

Indeed, a whooping 2.6 million teenagers don't know a person can die from an alcohol overdoes, according to the center for Substance Abuse Prevention. But sadly, the binge drinking body count is mounting:

~~~Last September, 18 year old freshman Scott Krueger fell into a coma after a frat party at the Massachusetts Institue of Technology. With a blood alcohol content of .41, he was kept on life support for 3 days and never regained consciousness.

~~~Less than a week later, a 17 year old high school student passed out after a weekend party. Her friends left her to sleep it off, but she never woke up.

~~~Also last fall, a young student at the University of Massachusetts fell to his death from the roof of a greenhouse. Investigators later found he was drunk at the time of the accident.

BINGE DRINKERS AND LAW BREAKERS:

The deaths are devastating enough for those close to the victims, but the impact extens far beyond the small circle of relatives and friends left behing. Often such tragedies come under investigation by the authorities, who are increasingly unwilling to treat them as accidents, particularly when the victims are under 21.

At Rowan University in New Jersey, for example, four students pleaded guilty in March of 1996 to supplying alcohol to an underage drinker who died. A year later, at Frostburg State University in Maryland, eight student were charged with manslaughter, reckless endagerment and selling alcohol without a license to a 20 year old John Stinner, who died in his dorm room after an off-campus frat part where investigators say he had at least 6 beers and 12 shots of vodka in 2 hours. more than a year after Stinner's death, the defendants pleaded guilty to selling alcohol without a license. In exchanged, prosecutors dropped the other charges. The young men were fined $1,000 each, ordered to perform community service and placed on five years' probation. Some say they got off easy. Had the other charges not been dropped and the students been found guilty, prosecutors say they could have been sentenced to long prison terms.

What about Ben Wynne? his frat brothers and more than 100 other witnesses had been questions by the plice but, "Cases like this are extremely hard to prsecute because so many of the potential witnesses were drunk themselves," says Louisiana Distric Attorney Doug Moreau. Wheather criminal charges are ever filed, a costly, emotionally wrenching civil trial is looming: Donald Hunt, Ben's best friend who paramedics says was only minutes away from death himself, has filed a lawsuit against the university, the frat and the bar, as well as the frat president and the student bartender on duty that night.

WHY IT HAPPENS:

Frightening as headline-kaing drinking fatalities are, millions of young people continue to binge drink. Most students who drink heavily don't think they have a problem--denial is a very important feature of problem drinking, says Wechsler. But this kind of drinking has a serious impact on their lives. Almost half of the frequent binge drinkers reported having at least five different problems as a result of their drinking.

Students who binge drink at least 3 times in a 2-week period report problems ranging from hangovers and missed classes to getting arrested. 46% report getting behind in their school work; 41 percent have engaged in unplanned sexual activity, more than half without using protection (60 percent of college women diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease were drunk at the time of infection, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Advocacy Institue); and more than 20 percent say they've injured themselves or damaged property.

Which makes you wonder why someone who had a horrible drinking experience would go near alcohol again. "there are a million 'reasons'students binge drink," says Wechsler. "some do it because they have nothing to do, some do it because they have too much to do. It's a highly social activity, and people with a heavy social calender, who have roommates and a lot of friends, tend to binge drink more frequently than other students."

Amy Lake, 15, can relate. "The first time I drank a lot was at a party--we kept passing bottles around," she remembers, "I'm real shy and once I started drinking, all of a sudden I wasn't nervous, I was this cool, fun person. There was this guy--I liked him so much and could never talk to him before. We started making out, and we hung out for a while after that." Eventually, though, Amy got to the point where she couldn't enjoy herself without alcohol. "Every time I went to a party I would drink all night-it made me feel like I had a lot of friends," she says. Fun, unfortunately, had a price: "I started getting sick a lot and trew up all over the place." then came a painful moment of truth. Amy was in the bathroom at school, and outside the stall she heard a group of girls laughint about someone who had gotten loaded at a part that weekend. "I figured out they were talking about me--how gross I was, how I was falling down everywhere." Still, Amy didn't quit--until she and a drinking buddy wrecked the friend's card while under the influence, and she wound up in treatment.

WHAT'S BEING DONE:

Schools across the country are trying to curb alcohol abuse on campus. Years before Ben Wynne's death, LSU banned alcohol at frat parties. The school conducts random, unannounced checks at frat houses--and did one at the frat house the night Ben died, but no alcohol was found. "I'm not sure what else we could have dont," says William Jenkins, the school's chancellor. "unfortunately it is not totally possible to regulate the conduct of our students, particularly in their off-campus activities. We have tried so hard to educate them about the dangers of alcohol abuse, and still, this kind of thing occurs."

Three campuses in Maryland are trying a controversial new approach: Johns Hopkins University, Salsbury State and Mount St. Mary's College have all opened bars on campus, only for students of legal drinking age. Supporters say university officials can monitor drinking activities more closely, and mayn students love the idea. Critics argue that bars on campus send a mixed message and can lead to dependency, even an increase in violence, though so far there have been no major incidents reported.

But no matter what policy schools, governments or parents may set, it's up to each individual to make a decision about drinking--whether to abstrain or drink responsibly. In the aftermath of Ben's death, not all students showed the mature response the university hoped for. Withing weeks, despite a well-publicized crackdown in force, more than three dozen students were cited for alcohol violations. As LSU stuendt Keven Day puts it: "those students who are determined to drink will find a way, and no matter how dangerous it might be, they're gonna think it couldn't happen to them."