Pubdate: October 6, 1997 Source: SF Chronicle Contact: This is What Binge Drinking Can Do to You by Mike Barnicle Here they were, the dead boy's family, parked in pretty much the same spot, doing some of the same things they did less than a month ago, only in reverse order. An enormous sadness created an automatic shield around them, too, as they carried the contents of his room down the steps and out the door of the old stone fraternity house on the Fenway in Boston. All the clothes, books and pictures belonged to Scott Krueger. He arrived a few weeks ago in order to begin freshman year at MIT; arrived as bright and attractive as they come, ready and quite able to take his initial step away from home and right into a life that offered spectacular opportunity. Now, with the academic year still in its infancy, Krueger is gone and his college is flunking common sense. With alcohol identified as the weapon that killed one of its students, MIT's response is to assemble a team of professors and administrators to study campus drinking and issue guidelines as if what occurred last weekend was a laboratory accident. God knows, it is impossible to legislate human behavior. And, certainly, a school cannot be held legally responsible for whatever it is individual students choose to do with themselves or to themselves once they walk out a classroom door. Too bad MIT and other institutions academic, media, and corporate do not view a sixpack or a pint of vodka as posing the same potentially lethal threat to life as a cigarette. The college is littered with no smoking signs, but they require an assembly before they can compose a sentence saying, "Get caught drinking and there will be no diploma." On the surface, America currently faces few threats. The Soviet Union has crumbled and disappeared. So the new communism, our great modern enemy, the largest evil we confront, has become smoking. We stigmatize anybody with a pack of Salems. Yet in the course of a normal day, alcohol absolutely ruins more American families and destroys more individual lives than a whole warehouse of filtertips. However, because Jim Beam and Coors Lite employ better marketing experts and ad agencies, we read more editorials about lung cancer than about cirrhosis. Now, on a pleasant fall weekend, we have an elite set of students, truly gifted people, using binge drinking as a badge of admission to some fraternity. What kind of "education" program do you concoct for people who scored 1,400 on their college boards and got into MIT? Is there a parent on this Earth tossing and turning because their son or daughter might smoke a cigarette on a Saturday night? But how many suffer from sleep deprivation hoping against hope that their child isn't behind the wheel, drunk, racing home to beat a curfew? There aren't enough fingers to point at who caused the tragic events leading toward Scott Krueger's death: Who sold the booze? Who purchased it? Who moved his body? Who, if anyone, forced him to drink and drink and then drink some more? Go to almost any city neighborhood, pause by nearly any corner, or park in the smallest of towns, and you will witness a huge national problem: Teenagers thinking they can act beyond their years by sneaking a couple of beers. In the lineup of dark nightmares any parent thinks possible to befall a child automobile crashes, robbery victim death by drinking isn't even on the list. But as Scott Krueger's family packed his things for the long trip back out the Mass Pike to New York state, they drove off with the agonizing knowledge that their son was killed by alcohol and died within a culture that glibly assumes smoking is the only lethal social evil around. Mike Barnicle is a columnist for the Boston Globe