I loved to party in college. My first two quarters were spent living in the dorms at UW and I threw too many parties and was on my final warning there when I left. I joined a fraternity and lived there for the next four quarters. All of the guys there loved to party and we drank an unbelievable quantity of alcohol. We would party and drink 3-4 nights a week on average.
I wish now that I had not drank all that alcohol. Studies show that drinking alcohol while studying greatly reduces the amount you learn. Drinking lots of alcohol kind of makes the actual purpose of college pointless.
I am a libertarian and generally lean towards allowing adults to do what they please. But many studies though show kids brains do not finish development until they are 25 and many of the brains mechanisms for controlling risky behaviors especially are not finished till then. I am not sure we should leave it up to kids in that age group to party or not. It certainly would be hard to stop though without fairly draconian measures.
In my early 20s after college, I organized Monday night dinners that ran for a couple of years. The main purpose was for me and a group of close friends to learn to cook from another close friend who was an incredibly talented chef. Every week our chef friend would teach us and I would over consume alcohol and not remember most of what he taught. It is one of my bigger regrets that I spent all that time getting drunk and can’t remember what I was supposed to be learning.
As an adult after college, it took me years to figure out the damage alcohol was doing to me. It took me years more to slowly cut back then to quit. Many friends from college never quit and remain alcoholics to do this day and will probably die of diseases related to alcoholism.
I wish I could go back and talk to myself before I started drinking at 17 and give harsh warnings, but to be honest I didn’t listen to the adults who did give me those warnings at that time. The best way to learn is from others mistakes instead of having to make those mistakes yourself.