The Commonwealth Times; Oct. 9, 2019

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THE INDEPENDENT PRESS OF VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY 2019 Newspaper Pacemaker finalist

VOL. 61, NO. 8 OCTOBER 9, 2019

‘College is all about the parties’ … and one study wants to know why New program shifts focus from substances to students EDUARDO ACEVEDO Contributing Writer Senior Jason Tsoi stood outside an apartment building in the Fan, making sure the doors behind him didn’t stay open too long, as the loud music made nearby windows shake. “College is all about the parties,” said Tsoi, a criminal justice major, with a bottle in his hand. As some students continue to spend their weekends going out to party and drink, a new research project at VCU and a grant worth more than half a million dollars may change the way the university assesses alcohol abuse. Two researchers, Danielle Dick, director of the College Behavioral and Emotional Health Institute, or COBE, and Joshua Langberg, associate dean for research at the College of Humanities and Sciences, have received $600,000 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in a three-year grant to research, develop and test an alcohol abuse prevention program. The program focuses on the underlying factors that cause college students to drink, instead of the current methods that focus on consumption and drinking safety. “What we know is these current alcohol

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prevention programs show limited effectiveness,” Dick said. “All of the alcohol programming focuses only on current alcohol use.” For the last decade and a half, this has been the case with most alcohol abuse prevention programs on American college campuses. “It’s all about giving students feedback on how their drinking compares to other students,” Dick said, “getting them to think critically about their substance use and if it interferes with anything in their life.” Environmental science major Mia Morrison said the university should do more with its alcohol abuse prevention programming. “I think [prevention] should be more about how to stop these behaviors instead of these statistics that you really don’t get much from,” Morrison said. Anna Disisto, a freshman, said a program focused on stopping substance abuse would be “much more helpful than programs telling you to simply not to drink.” Dick and Langberg’s research will focus on predispositions students face based on their “externalizing” and “internalizing” genetic codes that wire our brains and influence the way we see the world. See DRINKING on page 2