Parents whose children are busted for underage drinking might say, “Oh, you got busted for alcohol. Well, thank God it wasn’t for drugs.”
And according to 11 of 19 students surveyed by the Daily Lobo, they would not classify alcohol as a drug because it is legal, more commonly used and the effects on the body aren’t as harmful.

Jill Anne Yeagley, program manager for the Campus Office of Substance Abuse Prevention, said the alcohol industry has done a great job of making people not regard alcohol as a drug.

“It has an addictive potential, and because of the way it works on the brain, it can get people into situations where there are negative consequences,” she said. “We can’t just look at it as soda pop. It’s not in the same category at all.”

Psychology professor Derek Hamilton said the damage alcohol has on the brain depends on the user’s drinking habits.
“With alcohol, you can see frank brain damage as a result of chronic alcoholism,” he said. “No doubt about it. And death can be a side effect of alcohol. I mean, you can kill yourself drinking alcohol. It can happen acutely, and it can also happen in withdrawal. So you can potentially die either acutely, or in the long term from alcohol.”

Hamilton said our social norms are most likely what dictate our views on alcohol.

“There is probably a tendency to look at base rates,” he said. “You see lots of people drinking when you go out, so that’s not unusual. And at the same time, either consciously or unconsciously, we don’t want to acknowledge that something that we’re doing might be a bad thing.”
John Steiner, director of COSAP, said the alcohol industry has marketed its products to people of all ages. Steiner called it “alcopop.”

“So let’s take Smirnoff. That is probably part of some larger conglomerate,” Steiner said. “They start out with a line of very fruity, easy-to-drink, entry-level beverages which are aimed at the underage drinking market, which they vehemently deny. But we have very good evidence that they’re doing it. They then develop hard liquor and beer options to meet other needs of the older part of the spectrum.”
Alcohol is the most abused drug of New Mexico college students, according to a study by the New Mexico Higher Education Prevention Consortium. The study surveyed college students from San Juan College, Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute, New Mexico Highlands, UNM, Eastern New Mexico University, NMSU and Western New Mexico University.

In the survey they found that 71 percent of males and 62 percent of females reported consuming alcohol in the past 30 days. Also, 18 percent of men and 16 percent of women reported binge drinking (four to five drinks in two hours) in the past 30 days.
The study also cited alcohol as the most commonly consumed drug. Next was tobacco, then marijuana, prescriptions drugs, cocaine and amphetamines.

Alcohol is not included in the Controlled Substances Act classifications that Congress passed in the 1970s. The Drug Enforcement Administration schedules drugs based on medical use, potential for abuse and safety or dependence.
Hamilton said the National

Institute for Health has separate departments for alcohol abuse and drug abuse, even though alcohol can be just as addictive as other drugs. He said a drug can be classified as a substance depending on the intent of the user. A Schedule-I drug is classified as a substance that has no medical use and a high likelihood of addiction.

“At this point, the way I would look at it is, if alcohol weren’t a legal drug that you could go buy, and we just wanted to schedule it, I would say it would probably be a Schedule-I drug, at the very least a
Schedule-II,” he said.

Yeagley said COSAP is trying to make students more aware of their unconscious views about alcohol.

“Neither one of us (Yeagley and Steiner), or COSAP as a department are anti-alcohol,” she said. “We’re not trying to tell people and students ‘Don’t drink at all,’ but we do want students and other people to really understand that alcohol is a drug.”