Jacob Barrett

Contributing Writer, Print Journalism

As a high school student, the unnamed KSC student said he had whiskey on his breath while answering questions in the classrooms.

For this 20-year-old sophomore from New York, that was the norm.  Starting from his first drink at the age of nine, it became the usual thing to do, just like all the adults.

By high school, he was downing a bottle of whiskey before school, half in the bag while sitting in math class.

The New York native said his early years of drinking were when he did not know how to conduct himself. He called himself  an “angry drunk.” He gave an example of a violent fist-fight with one of his best friends during his junior year of high school.

“I don’t even know what we were fighting over, we were just drunk and fighting,” he said.

According to the 20-year-old, that was accepted in his group of friends. “Me and all my friends weren’t exactly the best kids. [If] something like that happened we just wrote it off because we were drinking and we were drunk all the time,” he said.

Getting booze has never been a problem for him.  Often, he looked for strangers to hook him up with alcohol. “Hey, ‘Mr. Guy’ in front of the liquor store,” he would say to strangers before asking for booze.

He said he was blacking out frequently during his first year at KSC, often polishing off a bottle of liquor by himself — sticking to cheap liquor and keeping his expenses low, but paying a high price in the morning.

He said his drinking had led to a few embarrassing moments. Once, at a party, he climbed to top of a roof and showered fellow partiers in his urine. He learned about this the next day from his buddies.

After many rough nights and hazy memories like the roof incident, he decided to cut down on his drinking. He now only drinks 10 or 11 beers on nights he goes out, but said he still puts drinking over his academics at times.

While he said he still gets decent grades, he admits he could be doing better if not for his drinking. The sophomore said he has learned to better control himself and no longer gets angry or violent while drinking. However, he said he has no intention to quit drinking entirely.

“Sometimes you just say [expletive] it and you go out and get drunk,” he said.