Michael Hanitchak '73 opened Dartmouth's fourth annual symposium on substance abuse on Friday with a Native American blessing, asking the Creator for guidance in reconciling two gifts bestowed upon humanity -- tobacco, which Hanitchak said "we sometimes use unwisely," and the power to "heal our brothers and sisters who have become unbalanced."
Hanitchak's cautionary words commenced the all-day event, held in Collis Common Ground and sponsored by the Dartmouth Center on Addiction, Recovery and Education, a joint effort between the College and Dartmouth Medical School that aims to address substance abuse at the College.
Though the symposium's list of speakers ranged from forensic psychiatrists to pediatricians, all presenters said they shared the goal of mitigating substance abuse. William DeJong '73, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, presented the Social Norms Marketing Project, a method of reducing alcohol consumption that aims to correct misleading perceptions about drinking on campuses.
The project's researchers have found that students share exaggerated views of the average amount of alcohol consumed by their peers and, as a result, feel pressured to drink more.
The goal of social norms marketing is to use campus-based media to report accurate drinking norms in order to decrease perceived normative expectations to drink.
This process should lower alcohol consumption in general, DeJong explained.
DeJong said studies have proved the strategy is effective on campuses with a normal to low density of alcohol outlets but the most alcohol-saturated campuses are unaffected by the project's efforts. DeJong said this problem could be solved if college administrators overcome their fears of student resistance and enforce stricter alcohol policies.
"Some administrators would literally say that [stricter policies] constituted fascism," DeJong said.
DeJong cited a survey in which students were asked to what extent they supported certain policy changes and to what extent they felt their peers would support the same changes -- the survey revealed that support for stricter policies was much higher than the perceived support of peers.
About 90 percent of students polled supported stricter disciplinary sanctions for students who engage in alcohol-related violence, compared with 65 percent of students who believed their friends would support the same measures.
Nearly half of the students supported undercover operations at bars, restaurants and liquor stores, 56 percent supported the prohibition of kegs on campus and 59 percent supported stricter penalties for the use of false identification to purchase alcohol.
In another speech, Angela Erdrich '87 DMS '94, a pediatrician with the Indian Health Service, argued that alcohol use poses a significant health problem on Indian reservations. Erdrich spoke on the need for improved public health within many Native American communities.
Emphasizing the importance of a person's childhood environment in determining the likelihood of substance addiction, Erdrich recounted how one of her patients explained how her own mother had drunkenly chased her with a knife, intending to kill her. The patient, a 13-year-old girl, had been drinking heavily for two years.
"There is so much more to treating a patient than just giving them medicine," Erdrich said.
Erdrich explained that the trauma historically inflicted on Native Americans has led to increased suicides, mental illness and substance abuse in many communities. She added that these symptoms are evident in other historically traumatized groups such as Holocaust survivors or prisoners of World War II Japanese internment camps.
Other speakers included Eva Marie Smith '74, the first Native American woman to graduate from Dartmouth, and Bill Sjogren '67 who runs the Alcoholics Anonymous program at the College.
