Underage drinking?

Universities and lawmakers across the nation need to get real. Especially Indiana University.

This entire charade is getting real old — the one where everyone likes to pretend nothing illegal happens, but everyone knows it does.

College-age kids have been drinking for as long as beer has been around. This isn’t some new phenomenon appearing out of nowhere.

Pretending that doesn’t happen is a farce.

IU is technically a “dry campus,” but everyone knows that’s a joke. Yeah, Indiana University, the school that hosts the Little 500, the “greatest college weekend,” likes to pretend that its students don’t drink. That makes a whole lot of sense.

Alcohol rules and regulations are getting worse, and none will affect the number of underage students’ choice to drink.

Anytime outrageous and unrealistic rules are put into place, an incentive is created for people to work around them. If rules were more realistic, people wouldn’t have as much of a reason to try and break them.

Back in the 1970s, policies were much more realistic and accommodating.

My dad said on his college campus underage students were legally allowed to drink “three-two” beer — low alcohol beer containing 3.2 percent alcohol. And people were fine with it.

No one was looking to break the rules because the established rule was acceptable enough to most people.

If IU were to institute some sort of policy like this, many binge drinking problems would subside. Students might actually be content with being able to legally drink low-alcohol beverages out in public and not feel the need to pre-game themselves into blackouts.

Underage college students are never going to stop drinking. It’s foolish for any authority to think a simple policy change will affect that. Universities and lawmakers need to address the real problems head-on, and stop playing this stupid game.

Banning kegs and handles at tailgates, fining students who come back to the dorms intoxicated, arresting people walking home at night drunk; all of these things only push students to be more sneaky and dishonest.

When students are constantly looking over their shoulders at tailgates in fear of the excise police seeing the beer in their solo cup, we have to take a step back and look at how ridiculous this all is.

Consider ticketing at tailgates. I have never heard of a situation where someone altered their drinking tendencies because they got a ticket during the tailgate.

We must start dealing with issues in a more realistic way instead of simply banning everything kids are going to want to do.

IU needs to come up with policies that actually work to help solve the problem.

­— lliskey@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Luke Liskey on Twitter @complaint_rogue.