Peer Health Educator Co-Director Laura Dobbs said PHEs teach students how to drink responsibly.
But Associated Student Government said that with 35 percent of Northwestern students binge drinking, PHEs need to do more.
Senate passed legislation Wednesday calling on the Director of Health Education to include in Responsibilities 101 a handout with more information than the current one on how students should take care of themselves and each other when drunk.
Dobbs, a Weinberg sophomore, said PHEs already discuss how to drink responsibly at the mandatory Responsibilities sessions, and also hold firesides and provide information in handouts at Searle Student Health Service. She said PHEs will answer any questions students ask without rendering judgment.
“We’re one of the most under-utilized groups on campus,” PHE Omayr Niazi said.
Allison Hall Sen. Alex Seeskin wrote the bill after a neighbor of his arrived at the dorm drunk with a bleeding head wound. Seeskin said he and his friends didn’t know the serious danger of having a head injury with alcohol in the system, and decided not to take their friend to Searle.
Later that night Seeskin, a Weinberg freshman, decided that he didn’t want to risk it and called Searle. His friend didn’t have a concussion but received 14 stitches.
The bill calls for a handout with more detailed information than the one offered at Responsibilities 101.
The current handout, published in 1997, offers tips on how to drink responsibly, such as eating foods that slow down alcohol absorption and avoiding drinks that speed alcohol into the bloodstream. The rest of the information mostly describes the negative consequences of drinking.
Seeskin used Duke University as a model for his legislation. Duke, which doesn’t have any mandatory meetings similar to the Responsibilities sessions, offers two full-time classes for credit on substance use.
“(Substance abuse) specialists are not dealing with the idea that students want to get drunk fast,” said Jeanine Atkinson, the substance abuse specialist at Duke for the last nine years.
Atkinson said that while information similar to that offered in the current Responsibilities handout might work for some, others would use it to get drunk quicker. Information needs to target those students as well.
Atkinson said she uses a harm reduction philosophy in alcohol awareness programs that covers some topics avoided by others. She offers several programs, one of which teaches students how to relieve hangovers.
Niazi said he talked with Seeskin and would work with him to provide more information, but said expanding the coverage of alcohol abuse in the sessions would be impossible and producing a new handout would be difficult.
“Giving out a handout is not going to do much,” said Niazi, a Weinberg sophomore. “In an alcohol emergency the last thing they’re going to do is read through that handout.”
Seeskin said that when his friend was in a very dangerous situation, he would have looked to a pamphlet.
“I don’t know how many students are going to ask,” Seeskin said.
