“Dude, I was so wasted last night.”

I’m sure just about every college student has heard this phrase before, but is the ensuing drunken story always so funny?

About 25 percent of college students say they have trouble with classes because of their drinking habits. Most of the trouble stems from missing class, doing poorly on tests and papers or simply receiving lower grades because of too much partying.

Having one drink every once in a while is surely not going to make you fail all your classes, but most college students have more than one drink when going out. I’m referring more to the “social” aspect of drinking, where it’s alright to have one more drink because everybody else is, or going out every weekend to get drunk with everybody else for no reason.

“Drinking really only wastes your time,” said Danielle Noble, a junior history major. “If you drink too much, you get sick and living like that is just a waste of time.”

Noble adds that drinking can make you feel good at first, but then you usually forget about what was fun about drinking in the first place.

Some people associate college with the movie “Animal House,” where partying and drinking can prevail over classes for up to four years (if you last that long). But is drinking in excess becoming an excessive problem for college students?

“I think students used to have a problem with drinking when I was an undergrad,” said post-graduate history student Victoria Therriault. “But now I think that mentality has lessened and students are starting to come to college for the right reasons.”

Of course there are positives and negatives to everything known to man, but it just seems to me that drinking is usually only used as a means of escaping problems; most people don’t even realize they are drinking alcohol to escape anything in the first place.

The negative consequences of drinking may seem stereotypical, but they’re true. Drinking wouldn’t be so negatively viewed if people stopped abusing alcohol. If people didn’t binge drink, drive drunk or make idiots of themselves when intoxicated, maybe drinking wouldn’t be blown out of proportion or thought of as the “norm.”

What people do on their own time is none of my business, but I don’t want to see binge drinking become a standard or staple of American college students.

Too often I’ve heard how someone was so plastered at a party that they did something very stupid and simply laughed it off. It makes me cringe when someone’s not embarrassed by their actions.

I worry that society might start viewing this behavior as funny and acceptable. Only until everybody sees drinking for what it really is, escapism, will people start to lose interest in making it such an important part of their Friday nights.