Like any good drinking game, the ice flow can be the life of a party. It's simple, slightly eccentric and lets the vodka come down smooth and cold.

Brookline Ice and Coal supplies the styrofoam, the hose and the ice. And at minimal cost, they will set up the luge that is placed through the ice blocks, cooling the vodka as it flows.

"We chiseled a path down the ice and poured [two shots of vodka] in somebody's mouth," says a student at the University of Rhode Island, the nation's top party school according to Playboy. "This was an event set up for the consumption of alcohol."

Events like the ice flow party at U.R.I. are commonplace at campuses throughout the nation. In fact, 44 percent of college students binge drink, according to a recent study of 140 schools across the country by Henry Wechsler, a lecturer on social psychology at the School of Public Health.

Binge drinking, or consuming five drinks in a single occasion at least once every two weeks, plagues students at many colleges, says Wechsler--not just at the so-called party schools.

At Harvard, which was not included in Wechsler's original study, students say drinking centers around private parties. Some might even say Harvard students stick to the bare essentials.

"Normally when we play poker, it's strip poker, so there are normally people naked in the basement of the Fox [Club]," says Lucy, a sophomore who says she attends many of the club's functions.

Lucy and all of the undergraduates interviewed for this article requested that pseudonyms be used, either because of current administrative action or because of the illegal nature of their actions.

"I've seen six guys [alone] in the basement completely naked, which baffles me," Lucy adds.

But for those concerned with controlling, or even limiting, the consumption of alcohol on campus, it is the inability to curb the problem which is most baffling.

"I don't think regulation is the answer," says David S. Rosenthal '59, the director of the University Health Services (UHS). "It's more of an allout effort working together with students, understanding the issues."

Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 says he shares Rosenthal's concerns about under-age and binge drinking, adding that he doubts whether legal restrictions can steer students away from alcohol.

"I guess I'm not convinced that a legalposition that says that students are not going todrink at all... is a very realistic assessment ofwhat the mores of people are," Jewett says. "Iwould rather have policies which recognize thatpeople will have contact with alcohol."

Jewett says that occasional drinking is not theproblem. Rather it is students' abuse of alcoholwhich has the dean, as well as other Universityofficials, concerned.

"My hunch would be that people use [alcohol] asa way to enhance their social life," says RandolphCatlin Jr., head of the mental health services atUHS.

Catlin's hunch, students say, is not unfounded.