Last week, the Policy, Alternatives, Community and Education Project's Partnership Council announced the university will provide ID scanners for certain downtown bars and liquor stores in an effort to provide responsible beverage service."" Wait, the university wants to cut down on underage drinking?
Stop the presses!
We all know UW-Madison officials don't like our reputation as a party school, which is one reason PACE started in the first place in 1996. The university now funds PACE, a program that began as a decade-long experiment funded by outside groups. Its first order of business is to waste our precious tuition dollars on $700 ID scanners.
Fundamentally, PACE's goal is to cut back on binge drinking on campus, or as they call it, ""high-risk drinking."" Now, this may shock some of you, but I actually support this goal. Anyone who's ever been out sober on a Friday or Saturday night at 2 a.m. knows what I'm talking about. I'm not a crotchety old member of Capitol Neighborhoods, Inc. who just wants those damn kids to quit making all that racket, but Madison's drinking culture does occasionally get out of hand.
Take the most recent example: A freshman resident in Witte residence hall got drunk and allegedly put a knife to a fellow student's throat. Or drunken bar-goers playing chicken with oncoming traffic, like the one who got hit on University Avenue last winter.
How can you solve problems like these? Well, ID scanners, especially when the university foots the bill, are definitely not the answer. According to Dawn Crim, special assistant to the chancellor, the scanners are just one piece of the puzzle designed to cut back on dangerous drinking.
""We all know there's not one silver bullet,"" she said. ""The challenge is to put together the right mixed portfolio that can have an impact.""
In its 10-year existence, PACE has quite a portfolio. That letter we all get from Chancellor John Wiley when we come here as freshman? That's PACE. The elimination of weekend drink specials - which is still being challenged in court - came from them, too. Other PACE products include this year's ""Show and Blow"" policy at football games, talks of keg registration and the Alcohol Licensing Density Plan, which the group strongly supported.
As I said before, I'm not against PACE's goal, but many of their tactics have been nothing but anti-free market, overbearing-mother-like garbage. Any time they've interfered with bars in Madison, the results have never come, and now that PACE uses university funds, we have a much bigger problem.
Ultimately, this argument comes down to that old cliché: We must change the drinking culture of Wisconsin before anything can be done on campus.
This means we can't have parents moving their children into the dorms and buying them a bottle of Captain Morgan for their first night in Madison. We can't have parents taking their high school students to Wando's for a fish bowl, which happened just last weekend with the wrestling tournament at the Kohl Center. We can't have parents doing beer bongs with their kids before football games.
According to the UW-Madison Population Health Institute, Wisconsin has the highest rates of both binge drinking and heavy drinking in the country. That's not something you change overnight, and it's definitely not something you change with some ID scanners or by limiting the number of bars downtown.
If UW-Madison students want to drink, they're going to drink - it's as simple as that. If they get kicked out of the bars then they'll go to their dorm rooms or their friend's house for a party where they may drink even more because the alcohol is cheaper and more readily available.
If PACE really wants to help cut ""high-risk drinking"" on campus, they need to invest their funds elsewhere. For instance, screening and intervention programs the university implemented let us find and help at-risk students, and letting 18-year-olds into bars to watch live music gives them alternative options to drinking.
Why shouldn't those few thousand dollars for scanners go toward something students will enjoy, like a campus movie theater, or even to better advertise the weekend movies at Memorial Union? It's admirable that PACE wants to help us, but it's time to leave the bars alone. If the $2 Long Islands at the Plaza on Thursday ever get taken away, there will
be riots.
Erik Opsal is a senior majoring in journalism and political science. Please send responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com
