After a senior bar party in the Radcliffe Quad, two roommates returned to their Mather House suite with a few extra items for the room. The two mananged, after consuming a large amount of alcohol, to make off with a number of pieces of Quad lawn furniture, carrying them home on the shuttle bus.

Harmless as pranks like this may seem, health educators warn that the relation between these stunts and alcohol may be more dangerous than most students realize.

Maura Valle, a health educator with University Health Services (UHS), and other prominent health researchers agree on two things. One, that a college atmosphere is conducive to heavy drinking and two, that excessive drinking in college can lead to more serious alcohol-related problems in the future.

"Traditionally, we see drinking in college as a rite of passage. It is condoned in a covert way," Valle says, adding that people who drink heavily in college should ask themselves, "`Is this something I'm going to grow up with?'"

"The word 'party' has become synonymous with drinking," says Henry Wechsler, a social psychology lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health.

But college drinking has to be placed in the total societal perspective, Wechsler says. "You have to look at what college students are bringing to college with them and what kind of society the college is in."

Wechsler says that 90 percent of American college students drink, but adds that that figure should not be surprising. Drinking increases as students approach their 20s, but decreases later, he says, making people between the ages of 18 and 24 the heaviest drinkers in the general population.

Wechsler says that in a study of high school drinking, 40 percent of high school males reported having had at least a six-pack of beer in the last two weeks.

"College drinking is a national follow-up of high school drinking," Wechsler says. "We shouldn't be surprised that there's a lot of college drinking, especially with men, because of high school drinking."

High school drinking, in addition to the independence that many freshpeople experience for the first time, helps to foster experimentation and habitforming use of alcohol.

Virginia Mackay-Smith, a senior freshperson adviser and proctor for Weld Hall, says she thinks drinking is a major problem for freshpeople. Most proctors, she says, "have the attitude that drinking is something freshmen do."

"I was an undergraduate in the mid-70s, and drugs were a big problem," Mackay-Smith says. "This year the drugs of choice are vodka and beer. I think that students now are misusing alcohol in the same way that students in the 70s were misusing drugs."

What is surprising, Wechsler says, is the number of heavy drinkers in college. "They drink it all at once and become intoxicated and are prone to get into the trouble intoxicated people get into," he says.

Wechsler co-wrote a 1981 study surveying 7083 New England college students about their drinking habits. The study showed that a high percentage of college students who drink excessively have suffered some of the consequences of alcohol abuse. The study shows that the 242 college males who were classified as "frequent-heavy drinkers" reported, on the whole, drinking more than four drinks or five cans of beer in one sitting.

Sixty-two percent of these heavy drinkers had been in trouble with authorities, and 53 percent had gotten into physical fights after drinking. About 29 percent said drinking had caused them to have an automobile accident and another 27 percent said they had been involved in other accidents as a result of alcohol use.