Alcohol consumption and college have come to be almost synonymous. Parents have a good idea that their children will party in college, and anyone who lives in a college town knows that drinking is a part of college life. Professors caution against overconsumption in morning classes, trying to guide their students down the straight and narrow. It’s understood that drinking is a problem in college towns — a big problem.

If you are one of the many people with a drinking problem, you can go to a local AA meeting. A quick Google search will reveal the places and times of those meetings. What you will not be able to do is attend meetings by students, for students, on campus and sponsored by the university itself.

This is a major problem. The university draws the students to Ames, the bars and adult beverage companies ply their trade to the students, and those who aren’t mature enough to handle drinking get hurt.

It’s not the bars’ responsibility to care about the personal lives of the students. However, it is a priority of the university to make sure the students have the resources available to them to live their lives to the fullest. While it could be put forward that, if someone needs help, they can seek it out, it can also be reasoned that many who need help don’t realize it until it’s too late.

The old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” comes to mind; it rings especially true after you consider that very little of either of those two things are being made available to the students of Iowa State by the institution itself. An optimal scenario is one where the incoming student is made aware that there is a program coordinated by his peers, endorsed by the university and standing by to help.

Currently, no substance abuse program is being pushed in the classroom. If a student-organized program is birthed and then promoted in the academic lives of students, it would be a giant step forward to helping students cope with drinking problems.

The problem is clear, present and looming. Ames, as a college town, has a drinking problem that has been recently highlighted by several student deaths that involved alcohol consumption. The time to address the problem is now. Waiting for more students to form a problem that could potentially contribute to decisions to drop out or lead to even more serious problems, is the default option of complacency.

The time to rise above complacency is now.