It's a truly uniting part of the human experience — one's first drunken social misfire. If you're lucky, you'll simply vomit in your best friend's mom's washing machine and then laugh it off later as everyone around you pretends to not notice your horrendous breath. If you're not so fortunate, this same expelling of foreign liquids from virgin lungs will find its way onto the freshly ironed Yeezus t-shirt your not-so-best friend has been bragging about since he scored it on eBay. At any rate, binge drinking in the dark crevices of law-enforced privacy has its charms — but it mostly has its potential pitfalls.
With the continued and inevitable rise of legal weed across the country, a steadily increasing number of underage drinkers seem to be growing privy to the possible ickiness of binge drinking. According to a recent study, both underage drinking and binge drinking have shown a sharp decline between 2002 and 2013 — with the number of underage participants dropping from 28.8% to 22.7% and the number of binge-prone participants dropping from 19.3% to 14.2%.
For the study, binge drinking was somewhat reasonably defined as "the consumption of five or more drinks at one event." This means that the five lemon drops you had at your friend's bachelor party constitutes binge drinking, while the four Cuba Libres you had alone do not.
