Are you able to have fun without alcohol? Do you have four or fewer drinks when you “party?”

If the answer to either of those questions is “yes,” then you just might be a puppet of UMass’s social norms campaign. Nice job, you sheep.

The random sampling of UMass students who were asked these questions over the past year were e-mailed surveys about their personal habits.

When asked in the survey how many drinks these students typically had, many of them responded as if they were using jackhammers on their keyboard’s number pads. It’s funny to imagine what those survey results currently imply.

If one in 10 UMass students “know how to have fun without alcohol,” then that means that 2,500 to 3,000 students right here on campus are raging alcoholics. Chances are, you know between one and 10 people who can’t function without a helping hand from Jack Daniels or Jim Beam. That’s impressive.

As a side note, those nine out of 10 students who “know how to have fun without alcohol” probably often choose not to. But you wouldn’t ever see that on the side of a bus.

If three out of four UMass students have four drinks or fewer when they party, that means that roughly 7,000 students on our campus are binge drinkers by UMass’s own definition.

These facts are presented in such a way that we can’t mathematically ascertain the true implications before the bus that they’re printed on drives away. Health services at UMass is trying to make it seem like we drink a whole lot less than we actually do.

Also, we should define “party.” A party, according to the statistical dictionary located in my imagination, is a “gathering of people who enjoy massive ingestion of alcohol.”

I wouldn’t dare vouch for myself, but to my understanding, four drinks are enough to get the average person pretty sloshed. Coincidentally, UMass defines binge drinking as more than four drinks per female and five drinks per male. I suppose the social norms here at UMass are convenient yet misleading, given the very definition of binge drinking.

On the other hand, how many of the people who receive these e-mail surveys actually respond truthfully? Do you know anybody who has checked their inbox and said, “Goodness, UMass is really counting on me to help change the tides of student residential life. I’d better be completely honest.”

I can almost guarantee that that number is not as great as the number of students who click the attractive little “delete” button.

In fact, a friend of mine informed me that a friend of his was photographed for a UMass social norms campaign poster.

“He wasn’t too happy about that,” he recollected.

Is there anything wrong with having fun while drinking? Now, I never passed the bar, but the last time I checked, drinking wasn’t illegal.

As I understand it, the social norms campaign was designed for students’ parents. Students have heard of alcohol, students drink, and students do stupid things every day with or without the influence of a magical beverage. They usually do them under the negligent purse strings of Mr. and Mrs. UMass parents.

If you attend UMass, you should experience a “party” at least once. Whether or not you are comfortable with ingesting a completely legal beverage that has the power to baffle your consciousness is ultimately your decision, and purportedly not at the mercy of a passing bus message.

Then, when students start getting out of line, we have the God-sent BASICS program to teach them about what students are doing to themselves when they drink alcohol.

When students are not assimilating the social norms information (which, according to the Web site, is written passively to avoid “scare tactics” and making people “feel bad”), we charge them money and try to take a more direct approach towards chastising the individual students.

Getting written up and forcibly sent to the BASICS program sounds like a huge scare tactic to me – and they don’t bother to give you a choice in the matter.

So what is it that the social norms messages aim to do? As well as I can reason it, the messages are the first-level attempt at squashing out the drinking culture, with a level of innocence that reminds you of Full House.

The next tactic corrals you into a program that puts an instructor in front of you to tell you how harmful your personal drinking is. After that, further offences can lead to more BASICS meetings, which cost more money, and in extreme cases, eviction from University housing.

So, if drinking isn’t illegal and students plan on doing it anyway, why go through all of this trouble to stamp it out? It would make sense to ascertain that it’s all about the Benjamins.

Lower drinking stats make the UMass look like a much safer place, regardless of what the pesky and unsightly “truth” is. Don’t try to cover it up, you administration cronies.

Remember – we got the facts from you.

Devon Courtney is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].