Past-year use of marijuana and hallucinogens by adults 35 to 50 years old continued a long-term upward trajectory to reach all-time highs in 2022, according to the Monitoring the Future (MTF) panel study, an annual survey of substance use behaviors and attitudes of adults 19 to 60 years old. Among younger adults aged 19 to 30, reports of past-year marijuana and hallucinogen use as well as marijuana and nicotine vaping significantly increased in the past five years, with marijuana use and vaping at their highest historic levels for this age group in 2022. The MTF study is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health, and is conducted by scientists at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, Ann Arbor.
While binge drinking has generally declined for the past 10 years among younger adults, adults aged 35 to 50 in 2022 reported the highest prevalence of binge drinking ever recorded for this age group, which also represents a significant past-year, five-year, and 10-year increase.
“Substance use is not limited to teens and young adults, and these data help us understand how people use drugs across the lifespan,” said NIDA director, Nora Volkow, M.D. “Understanding these trends is a first step, and it is crucial that research continues to illuminate how substance use and related health impacts may change over time. We want to ensure that people from the earliest to the latest stages in…
Carla Garson’s memories of her final TikTok Live with her partner, 23-year-old David Lee Perez — which took place on Dec. 26, 2022 — are blurry.
The couple had found modest fame in the summer of that year through their shared TikTok account, Operation Hangover, which they used to broadcast themselves taking shots in exchange for cash on the platform’s Live function. Together, sometimes multiple times a week, they would sit in the basement of their home and tally up the drinks they’d consumed on a whiteboard behind them for their audience.
According to Garson, their drinking had become heavy by December 2022 as their streams had grown in popularity, and the holiday period meant more people were available to watch and pay them to take shots. Garson said the couple charged between $5 and $15 dollars per shot, although their earnings varied widely depending on that night’s crowd.
“On a good night, we made roughly $500,” said Garson, who told HuffPost that the pair were given money through PayPal, CashApp and TikTok Live’s gift function. “On a bad night, I would say, maybe like $50.” (The BBC reported that TikTok takes a 70% cut from the earnings creators receive through TikTok Live gifts, a figure the platform’s spokesperson described as “inaccurate”; on its website, TikTok states it takes a 50% cut, “after deducting the required payments to app stores, payment processors and any other adjustment required under [its] terms and policies.”)
Garson said she and Perez had tried to mitigate the risk of drinking to excess on the streams by secretly filling a small number of their alcohol bottles with sweet tea and other soft beverages, although she claimed the remaining ones always contained real booze, and that she and Perez were often actually intoxicated on their livestreams.
Sometimes, according to Garson, Perez would chug straight liquor on the Lives, usually when he was stressed. Although she said she often tried to warn him that his actions were dangerous, she was hopeful that they wouldn’t be drinking online for much longer.
“We wanted to change our TikTok from drinking to cooking and music,” said Garson, now 21, who lives in Colorado, where she is currently taking a break from studying psychology. She added that she and Perez wanted to spend 2023 looking after their health. “It was pretty miserable for the both of us, I think, towards the end,” she said of the streams. “It got pretty rough.”
Garson remembers feeling the pressure to drink being especially hard on the night of the pair’s last livestream. She told HuffPost that they had attracted a larger crowd than usual and were paid to take four or five shots at a time. Garson said she ended up drinking 11 shots in total, while Perez had 14, and according to her, shotgunned an additional two beers. The last thing Garson clearly recollects, she said, is Perez chugging an entire Four Loko — a 23-ounce can of malt alcohol that can be up to 14% ABV — in one sitting.
It was purchased for him, she alleges, by a TikTok creator who claims in his TikTok bio and some videos to be sponsored by Four Loko. “[The creator] paid 20 bucks for him to chug that,” Garson said, and also alleged that the creator she referenced — who makes videos of himself shotgunning cans of Four Loko for an audience of tens of thousands of followers — had convinced Perez to shotgun two Four Lokos in a separate livestream the night before, on Dec. 25. (The man behind the account did not respond to HuffPost’s multiple requests for comment, eventually blocking its reporter.)
Garson says she doesn’t remember much after that and was “blackout drunk.” According to her, she does remember Perez vomiting in the bathroom and being unresponsive when she called out to him. She remembers sobering up rapidly when she realized he wasn’t breathing and calling 911. She said she began to start hitting his back and attempted CPR. Amid the chaos, their phone — which the pair had been livestreaming on — fell into a pile of bags under their coffee table. According to Garson, she had no idea that the phone continued to broadcast audio of the unfolding nightmare to an audience of 280 people.
In one of the few recordings that remain of the incident, Garson could be heard crying, telling someone that her partner wasn’t breathing. A man in the background — whom Garson identified as a family member — could be heard yelling, saying that Perez had been passed out for a while. Eventually, one of the paramedics that Garson summoned to the scene called to his colleague to give Perez the drug epinephrine, which is administered to reverse cardiac arrest. In the recording, one of the paramedics stated that Perez had a history of pancreatic cancer. (According to Garson and Perez’s mother and sister, Perez informed his family that he had stage 3 endocrine cancer of the pancreas in 2021, and after several months of asking them to drop him off outside of the hospital for chemotherapy, he announced that he had entered remission in 2022.)
Meanwhile, viewers were commenting in real time. Some left messages like “Prayers for Dave!” or expressed their dismay. Others were more insensitive, saying it was “too late” to save Perez or that he was “way past dead.” Many people began to beg the TikToker to wake up, as if he could hear their messages. The livestream’s viewership crept up from 280 to 310.
Suddenly, the sound of clicking medical devices stopped. The paramedics could no longer be heard, and soon the livestream turned to static. On the TikTok video, only viewers’ messages and a “rising star” label — a ranking TikTok awards to creators making the most income from their Live streams — were visible in the corner of the screen. Some 343 people were watching toward the end of the recording. The last thing that could be heard before the recording cut out was the voice of Perez’s family member. “He’s dead, Carla!” the family member screamed. (TikTok declined to comment on Perez, the circumstances of his death, or the fact that it was livestreamed.)
Despite the best efforts of Garson and paramedics, Perez was pronounced dead at the scene. It’s a memory that still haunts Garson. “I tried saving him. I tried to revive him,” she said. “I just remember screaming for him.”
Since then, she has vowed to raise awareness about the dangers of alcohol-based TikToks — and the brands that creators claim they work with to create their content. “It is very common to have partnerships and sponsorships [among alcohol-based creators],” Garson said. “That’s when it’s promoting, literally, alcoholism — and I’m going to bring awareness to it.”
In response to Garson’s claim, a TikTok spokesperson said that such content would be a “breach of our policies.”
Although it is possible they were unaware that their products were being promoted in this way on TikTok, HuffPost also reached out to seven alcohol brands and one alcohol retailer that either had their branded merchandise or bottles of alcohol promoted by TikTokers who engage in drinking Lives, including Pernod-Ricard-owned Screwball Whiskey, Jim Beam Whiskey and malt beverage Four Loko. Only two independent brands — Trust Me Vodka and TC Craft Tequila — responded.
Garson, Perez and many of the peers they met from TikTok all hail from the same sphere: the intense and often dangerous world of drinking on TikTok Lives, where creators stream themselves downing what appears to be alcohol for cash in real time. The niche has been fueled by its lucrative nature, which allows influencers to make a quick buck through streams and potentially attract the attention of brands that have allegedly sent them swag, alcohol and other items. It points toward a larger, more troubling trend: In a saturated social media market where extremes attract the most attention, it pays to take risks and build personal brands around bingeing — and the results can sometimes be deadly.
Despite the prevalence of alcohol-themed creators on TikTok — who have, at the time of this writing, attracted over 24 billion views between the hashtags #alcohol and #cocktail alone — the platform has a hard-line stance on the promotion of booze-based content. In its branded content policy, TikTok explicitly prohibits branded content that promotes “products or services” for alcoholic beverages, alcohol-making kits, alcohol-sponsored events or even “soft drinks presented as mixers for alcohol.” The platform defines branded content as videos that feature “a product or service that has been gifted to [a creator] by a brand, or that [a creator has] been paid to post about (whether in the form of money or a gift), or for which [a creator] will receive a commission on any sales.”
In its community guidelines, the platform also bans videos that facilitate the trade or purchase of alcohol and states that videos of excessive alcohol consumption will be restricted to users aged 18 and over. (In a 2022 study, Dutch news organization Pointer made a fake account for a 13-year-old boy and found that 1 in 5 videos on the feed of this hypothetical minor contained alcohol, despite TikTok’s age restriction policies.)
A TikTok spokesperson confirmed that videos HuffPost provided to the company showing adults consuming “excessive amounts” of alcohol were age-restricted to users 18 and up globally, through a combination of tech-based solutions and human moderation, but said there was “no set level” in its guidelines for excessive consumption. The spokesperson also suggested the Pointer investigation was unfair. “I don’t think this study represents how most people would engage with TikTok,” said the spokesperson. “People don’t intentionally search for one type of content.”
While alcohol-based content on the platform is largely produced by creators like mixologists and bartenders, who pour drinks that they consume off-camera, there is a corner of the niche specifically devoted to alcohol consumption — even to excess. Perez, for instance, occupied a corner of TikTok streaming that was dominated by creators who appear to be heavy drinkers and who sometimes refer to themselves as “senders,” as they always finish their drinks in one chug.
Popular creators in this sphere include @izzydrinks, who has 382,000 followers and has previously posted videos of himself chugging what looks like several beers in succession until he violently vomits, and the creator who allegedly bought Perez Four Loko the last two nights of his life, who has over 20,000 followers and films himself shotgunning cans of the beverage while wearing branded gear. (@izzydrinks did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did the creator who has aligned himself with Four Loko.)
Other creators film themselves downing what they claim are potent cocktails, like @pourdecisionmaker, who has just over 200,000 followers and has recorded himself drinking a mix that he says is made up of 128-proof moonshine, Don Q 151 rum and 190-proof Everclear, which allegedly left the TikToker vomiting for “three rounds with the toilet.”
“That one would probably be the most extreme I’ve ever done,” said Chris, the 28-year-old military veteran and IT worker behind the @pourdecisionmaker account, who told HuffPost that he would prepare for such drink-based events by drinking a lot of fluids and eating a meal to “cradle” the alcohol. (Chris asked HuffPost to withhold his last name for privacy reasons.) Although it’s possible that creators like Perez, Garson and Chris water down or fake their drinks, Chris claimed to be drinking real alcohol in his videos and asserted that he is often inebriated in his content. “I’ve had some nights I wish I could take back, obviously, and I’ve had some nights where I went to bed with a little bit of a drunk feeling and I wake up fine the next morning,” he said. “It would just depend on the night.”
Most creators in the “sender” niche also broadcast themselves on TikTok Live, where they offer to down drinks or take shots in exchange for cash gifts from their viewers — sent either through TikTok Live’s gift function or directly to PayPal and CashApp accounts. Influencers who engage in these streams have formed a small community, often appearing in the comment sections of each other’s videos or broadcasting themselves on TikTok Live opening and drinking cans of beer and other alcohol, slurring and using breathalyzers, among other things. While the nature of live broadcasts makes the sessions hard to trace, remnants of them persist online.
Another recording taken in January of this year shows the TikToker @drinktesterofficial, who has over 800,000 followers, slurring on Live and seemingly inebriated as he pours himself shots in front of his audience. (HuffPost reached out to @rudysends and @drinktesterofficial multiple times for comment, but did not receive a response.)
Two more videos HuffPost viewed feature Chris, aka @pourdecisionmaker, taking part in TikTok drinking Lives. They include a promotional TikTok directing people toward his livestream, in which he promised to do a shot for every TikTok gift he received while livestreaming. In that video, he could be seen brandishing a breathalyzer, which he promised to use regularly so his followers could see exactly how drunk they got him. It has been viewed over 600,000 times.
According to Chris, who built a bar in his East Coast home just before the pandemic started, the Lives were just a way to support his hobby and TikTok account. While he claims it isn’t necessarily about the money, he does use his earnings to reinvest in his channel and “buy more alcohol to make more content with, and then it’s just an endless cycle from there.” He said he participated in roughly 15 TikTok Lives where he drank alcohol in exchange for cash, which he said generated roughly $50–$75 in profit. He also says that the breathalyzer was used as a way to combat viewers who argued that he wasn’t drinking real alcohol on Live, although he admitted to HuffPost that he could “skew higher numbers” on the device by breathing into it immediately after taking a shot. “It would bring in the views,” he explained, “and it would obviously do well.”
When HuffPost approached TikTok for comment on @pourdecisionmaker’s videos, the platform responded by deleting his account. “Content which encourages people to drink in exchange for gifts does violate our dangerous acts policy, which covers behavior that is likely to cause physical harm,” a TikTok spokesperson later said to HuffPost. “We removed [@pourdecisiommaker’s account] for violating our guidelines.”
Shortly after his account was deleted, Chris began using a second @pourdecisionmaker account and uploaded a video promoting merchandise and alcohol that he claims he received from alcoholic iced-tea brand Arizona Hard. The video has since been deleted, and Arizona Hard did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment. As of Wednesday, @pourdecisionmaker’s account had reappeared; by Thursday, after HuffPost reached out to TikTok for comment on whether the account was reinstated, it was removed again. “This account has been banned in accordance with our rules,” a TikTok representative said.
The behavior seen in the Lives of creators like Chris — reminiscent of scenes that were once reserved for shock television shows like “Jackass” or frat parties — is becoming more common on social media. Meanwhile, the competition for views incentivizes risk-taking and aggressive or dangerous content that helps new creators stand out and generate an audience quickly.
But according to Perez’s mother, Angela Mosbarger, at first, the drinking in Operation Hangover’s Lives wasn’t extreme at all, and she even took part in one to celebrate Halloween 2022. At the time, she said, she had little cause for concern. There weren’t many viewers on the stream, and while Mosbarger admits someone paid her $20 to take a shot with Perez, she said she’d only had one drink by the end of the evening, and believes that Perez and Garson had consumed five between them. No one was drinking to excess or being pressured to do anything reckless, she said, and it felt like a relaxed atmosphere.
“I didn’t think of it being a harmful thing, because there wasn’t a lot of alcohol,” said Mosbarger, 51, who works in the hospitality industry. She remembers the evening on TikTok Live — which attracted a humble 20 spectators — as being one of her best memories with her son. “He was really excited about it,” she added, “because he was making good money on it.”
According to Jennifer Pauley, a 61-year-old stay-at-home grandmother and former Operation Hangover viewer from Texas, many of Perez and Garson’s viewers were enticed by the pair’s personalities. “It always started out fun and friendly, and you could see the love between Carla [Garson] and David [Perez],” she said. “They were so young and playful, it was nice to see at the beginning. But then you knew where it was going to go. They were so personable — and they were so young.”
As the summer went on and their live audiences swelled from tens to hundreds of people, Garson said that she and Perez found it harder to control the amount they were drinking. She told HuffPost that the situation was complicated by Perez’s medical debt — he had told her that he’d accrued it due to struggles with lupus and arthritis, although she said she’d never seen him take medication for the conditions — and the income from the streams spurred them to push through even as the number of shots they were taking each night began to rise.
“David thought it would be a good idea to do the [shots-for-cash] TikTok as a side hustle. Just more money to help us financially take care of the family and the bills,” she said. The real draw for Perez, in Garson’s eyes, however, was the adoration and approval of his newfound audience. “He finally felt accepted. He found a place where he was able to be himself. He didn’t have to be anybody else,” she added. “I felt that was definitely what contributed to him doing it — the people encouraging it.”
Pauley said she also noticed the livestreams were getting out of control, and as a person who claims to have spent large portions of her life around alcoholics, she said she felt compelled to stay in order to try and protect the pair from both themselves and their increased levels of drinking. “I would just watch and try to comment to the point where I wouldn’t get banned — you know, like telling them to eat something, or take a break, or drink some water,” she said.
She said she often felt helpless against the majority of viewers, who, from her perspective, seemed more interested in getting Perez and Garson hopelessly drunk, to the point where — Pauley said — Perez would often pass out. “People knew what the outcome of buying [them] the strongest shot is, but they still did it, because they wanted to see a tragedy,” she added. “It was a whole audience of pushers.”
For those closest to Perez, the months after his death have been confusing and shocking. His sister, Dayana Sandoval, who is 33 and lives in Wisconsin with her young daughter, was floored when she learned of the Operation Hangover account. She remembers her younger brother as a gentle soul who wasn’t the type to drink or behave recklessly — according to her, he opted for non-alcoholic beer on his 21st birthday as he wasn’t fond of the substance. Even during the period when Perez and Garson did their TikTok Lives, Sandoval says, he avoided alcohol at family gatherings on the weekends.
According to Sandoval, the first time she heard about her brother’s TikTok career was at 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 27, when Perez was receiving CPR on TikTok Live. Her younger sister had called to explain the situation and said that it was being broadcast on the social media platform. Sandoval tuned in as quickly as she could. “I was trying to read the comments because everything was blacked out, and then I heard on the phone — and on the TikTok Live, at the same time — that my brother had been pronounced dead,” she said.
Although Sandoval says she’d tried to participate in the Live, asking questions and attempting to attract the attention of moderators, she claims she was muted on the basis that they didn’t believe she was Perez’s sister. “It was just a very odd situation, and I was panicking.”
It’s a memory that still haunts Pauley, who watched the night of Perez’s death as it unfolded live on TikTok. “It was horrific because you could hear everything — every step, the EMTs talking to each other, saying that [Perez] wasn’t going to make it. I just couldn’t turn it off not knowing if he was going to be OK — and I know in my head that there was nothing I could do or say, but it was kind of like I wanted to be there for Carla,” she said.
Both Garson and Pauley also claim that moderators had seemingly repeatedly deleted messages urging Garson and Perez to slow down their drinking that night, although no records of the chat remain. (According to Garson, the moderators, who were appointed jointly by Garson and Perez, were fans with extra powers allegedly tasked with helping to police the chat, although Garson said she and Perez did not know them in real life, and HuffPost was unable to locate them. TikTok’s own content policing team, which only moderates content based on user reports, is a separate entity.)
“I feel like if I saw [those messages], I would have done something,” noted Garson. “Even if I was in that vulnerable state, you know?”
Both Garson and Sandoval also have questions for the TikTok creator who Garson alleges bought Perez one of his last-ever drinks. “A big content creator [in this scene] knows alcohol and the risks,” said Sandoval, who felt it was an irresponsible act for someone who claims he is “officially sponsored by Four Loko” in his TikTok biography. “He’s just going to come in and say, ‘Hey, do a Four Loko!’ when someone is already clearly inebriated? That seems destructive to me. I don’t understand it.” (Four Loko did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Although there are no strict rules around alcohol advertising on social media in the U.S., there are self-imposed ethical standards that companies are meant to adhere to; according to the FDA, these standards include not advertising in areas where more than 28.4% of the audience is under 21.
Industry-wide guidelines set out for distilled spirit brands also state that alcohol advertisements should portray drinkers “in a responsible manner” and not show alcohol being consumed “abusively or irresponsibly,” while beer and malt liquor guidelines state advertisements and marketing materials should not depict situations where beer is “consumed excessively [or] in an irresponsible way,” or “portray persons in a state of intoxication or in any way suggest that intoxication is acceptable conduct.”
Despite these regulations, HuffPost has reviewed several videos — which are still online at the time of writing — that seem to show influencers flagrantly ignoring these rules while saying they’re working with alcohol companies. Creator @izzydrinks claims to have received samples of alcohol from independent brands ’Merican Mule, Trust Me Vodka, as well as branded merchandise from Pernod-Ricard-owned Screwball Whiskey. Even Garson said she still receives requests from alcohol brands: She shared an email from TC Craft Tequila Company with HuffPost that promised Garson a free bottle of tequila in exchange for an unboxing video after her partner’s death. (HuffPost also has copies of videos posted by @pourdecisionmaker in which he claimed to receive alcohol from independent brands ’Merican Mule and Kurvball Whiskey, and branded merchandise for Pernod-Ricard-owned Screwball Whiskey and Suntory-Group-owned Jim Beam Whiskey, before TikTok removed his account.)
One of the beverages featured in these videos — Bakesale Cookie Liquor, which has been used in multiple clips created by both @izzydrinks and @pourdecisionmaker — appears to have been sent by CW Spirits, or Country Wine and Spirits, an online alcohol retailer. A number of creators in TikTok’s alcohol niche appear to be advertising for the company, and a hashtag dedicated to it, #cwspirits, has attracted almost 40 million views. In some unboxing videos, where influencers unpackage gifts from the retailer, affiliate codes for purchases are visible in the captions. Others display affiliate codes for CW spirits in the background of each of their videos, while a select few — like @jonesnmann, who has over 500,000 followers — overlay the website’s address and discount codes on their videos. (@jonesnmann did not respond to a request for comment. CW Spirits did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
A few savvy TikTokers — including @izzydrinks, as well as @beauty.and.the.booze, who has over 300,000 followers, and @heavyhands94, who has over 1 million followers — share their personalized discount codes for CW Spirits via Linktree. (Content facilitating the sale or trade of alcohol is explicitly banned on TikTok, something a TikTok spokesperson confirmed to HuffPost. Several TikTok accounts promoting CW Spirits were removed from the platform after HuffPost requested comment on the matter. @izzydrinks, @beauty.and.the.booze and @heavyhands94 did not respond to requests for comment.)
Chris, the man behind @pourdecisionmaker, told HuffPost that he was always approached first by alcohol brands when it came to offers of merchandise or free alcohol, although some brands — like Jim Beam Whiskey and Screwball Whiskey — only offered to send him things after he’d already made videos with their alcohol on his account. He also told HuffPost that he’d been approached directly by CW Spirits, which sent him free alcohol each month if he made around two sales a month on the platform from his affiliate codes.
When asked if he knew that such partnerships were in violation of TikTok’s content policy, he admitted that he did. “I was told that there was some kind of workaround for that,” said Chris. When asked if an alcohol company had told him that, Chris refused to answer. He is ambivalent about his future prospect for partnerships. “If it just so happens to be, that’s wonderful,” continued Chris, who told HuffPost he has “gained considerable traction” with a new TikTok account that hosts both alcohol-based and comedy-based content. “If it doesn’t, life goes on and I can continue my content creation without it.”
HuffPost sent multiple requests for comment to ’Merican Mule, Trust Me Vodka, TC Craft Tequila, Screwball Whiskey, Four Loko, Jim Beam Whiskey and CW Spirits in response to allegations in this article. Only two companies responded.
A spokesperson from TC Craft Tequila told HuffPost over email that the company only sends alcohol to U.S.-based Instagram influencers, suggested that a company it had outsourced work to was at fault, and claimed it had launched an investigation to understand how “an insensitive and misdirected communication” had occurred between Garson and one of the company’s representatives.
Mitchell Bailey, co-founder of Trust Me Vodka, also responded. “No, we do not send alcohol to influencers for promotion,” Bailey said over email. “We are aware of the numerous rules and restrictions around alcohol. Everything we do is governed and approved.” When HuffPost sent Mitchell a video of @izzydrinks promoting Trust Me Vodka on TikTok and asked for additional comment, he said: “We do not and have not sent product to him.”
Over five months after her brother’s death, Sandoval still has plenty of unanswered questions, especially when it comes to TikTok. Her family, she said, has not been contacted by the social media company in the wake of her brother’s death, despite the fact that Perez’s accident made U.S. headlines. No one has explained why the entire scene was broadcast on Live, despite viewers’ purported attempts to report it.
“I would like to understand why the hell there’s nobody that’s actually monitoring during these Lives. I don’t understand how someone gets pronounced dead online, and the whole aftermath of crying and screaming and trauma is just right there, live, in front of hundreds of people,” she said. (TikTok did not respond to this specific allegation.)
Pauley — who claims to have reported the Live to TikTok “at least” 10 times when it became clear that Perez was in trouble — has also been horrified by TikTok’s silence on the matter.
She also said that, a week before her interview with HuffPost, she witnessed another incident on TikTok in which a young man was swigging large amounts of alcohol for his livestream audience first thing in the morning; by the evening, she said, he was “stumbling around his living room” and had seemingly passed out behind his sofa. “You couldn’t tell if he was alive or not,” said Pauley, who claims she had reported the Live four times that morning, while the TikToker in question was still standing. “I reported him [again, when he passed out] probably four or five times.”
A TikTok spokesperson said the company invests “heavily in training, technology, and human moderators to detect, review, and remove harmful content,” and stressed that frequently reported accounts that are found guilty of “repeated or severe violations” are either denied future access to TikTok Live or have their accounts suspended.
The turmoil that Sandoval and her relatives have gone through in the wake of Perez’s death has been further compounded by a shocking revelation. In the process of obtaining an autopsy — in which a coroner ruled that Perez had died from acute ethanol toxicity — Perez’s family found out that he had never had cancer at all. It had all been an elaborate lie.
“We’re really angry at him because it’s like, ‘What were you thinking?’ — but I can’t ask him that because he’s not here,” Sandoval said. “He was completely healthy and he had his whole life ahead of him — and he died because of what? So he can gain love and attention from thousands of people? He was successful in doing that, but at the cost of his life.”
Although it wasn’t his intention, Perez has become a cautionary tale about seeking social media fame — and the approval of others — no matter how dangerous the method is. But although drinking Lives are destructive and irresponsible, they would not exist in the first place without the viewers who watch and sometimes even encourage them.
Sandoval finds that hard to think about. “My brother was in so much pain,” she said. “How do you watch somebody and not understand? Are we seriously that oblivious as a society, that we can see someone doing something so destructive, and we literally don’t stop it?”
Garson was left heartbroken by the news of Perez’s lies. “I’m trying to wrap my head around that too, currently, and trying to figure out why. You know, I have so many questions,” she said. Garson is also struggling with what she sees as the lack of humanity on TikTok. In recent weeks, she has taken to entering the drinking Lives that still occur on the platform and telling people Perez’s story in the hopes that they might change their behavior.
While some folks have been receptive, according to Garson, bigger creators in the scene don’t want to hear her message. “I got completely blocked and banned from everything,” said Garson, who has been kicked out of chats by creators and their moderators for trying to educate their audiences. “It’s one of those situations: You could bring the water to a horse, but you can’t make the horse drink.”
Some creators, however, have made concerted efforts to change their ways. Chris said he has stopped doing drinking Lives in the wake of Perez’s death and has made efforts to curb his drinking.
“It happened so suddenly. It shocked me and had me make changes in my life that I needed to,” said Chris, who has also toned down the drinking in his regular TikTok videos. “Alcohol is meant to kill you, not meant to keep you alive. It’s nothing to be played with — it’s a very serious thing,” he continued. “Alcohol takes such a toll on the body, that when you do drink every other day or three times a week, your body doesn’t have time to heal.”
Looking back, Garson recognizes that she and Perez were once in the same position: using liquid IVs to recover from Lives as their drinking became more intense and refusing to acknowledge that they were in a bad situation. According to her, they were drawn in by the promise of success and a community on social media that they could utilize to build a life together.
Now, Garson — who is staying with Perez’s family while she recovers from the loss of her partner — feels sad that drinking is part of his legacy. “He’s more than just alcohol — he’s a person. He had a lot of ambitions,” she said. “He had a heart of gold. I think that’s the biggest thing: He had a heart of gold.”
“He had a smile that could light up a room, even from the other side of a screen,” Chris added. “It made me want to be a better person. Hopefully, from here on out, I can be a better [advocate] of responsible drinking.”
Perez’s ability to draw people in, spread joy and even inspire others is something that Garson and Sandoval, who have grown close since his passing, frequently discuss on the phone.
For them, one of the saddest parts of losing Perez was realizing that he couldn’t see himself the way his family, peers and fans saw him. “So many people loved him — and he didn’t feel like being himself was enough to get loved,” Sandoval said. “I don’t get it.”
Need help with substance use disorder or mental health issues? In the U.S., call 800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline.
It was almost midnight on St. Patrick’s Day at the University of Michigan, and the party was in full swing. Inside, college students were stumbling and falling to the ground as the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” pulsated through the room. A line ran out the door, filled with eager faces looking for a good time.
No, this wasn’t a fraternity mixer. This was Sober Skate.
And people weren’t falling onto a sticky wood floor, but a skating rink at the Yost Ice Arena. The event was so popular that within the first 30 minutes, the rental desk had already leased 300 of its 350 pairs of skates. The 45 large pizzas that organizers ordered were gone in an hour, as were the cases of Faygo and Diet Coke.
Each year around St. Patrick’s Day, Sober Skate — co-hosted by Michigan’s Collegiate Recovery Program and the Washtenaw Recovery Advocacy Project — offers local college students and community members a dry alternative to the holiday’s liquor-soaked festivities. Not all attendees identify as sober, but they’ve all chosen to abstain from alcohol on one of the highest-risk drinking nights of the year.
“Hundreds of people come out,” said Matthew Statman, manager of the recovery program, which supports students healing from substance-use issues. “And most of them are just young people who are not interested in drinking green beer.”
This year’s Sober Skate was the most popular yet. Statman said he is always surprised by how many students “come out of the woodwork” to attend the program’s substance-free events.
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
A sober skating event hosted by the Collegiate Recovery Program at Yost Ice Arena in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“They’re everywhere,” Statman said. “Most students are not using substances heavily or frequently, but they’re just in the libraries and in the dorms. And you wouldn’t see them otherwise.”
For as long as the modern campus has existed — as long as films like Animal House and She’s the Man have primed expectations for campus life — administrators have tried to curb dangerous drinking. While students’ participation in drinking has fallen in the past 40 years, high-risk binge drinking has remained a stubborn problem.
Yet recently, there’s been a shift in many students’ attitudes toward drinking. Instead of seeing alcohol as a fact of college life, more students are questioning its presence in their lives. Many are deciding they don’t want it to be in their lives — or at least not as much.
Drinking remains widespread on campuses, and other substances are only becoming more popular. Still, students who choose sobriety are facing less social shame and judgment than in years past.
That’s great news for administrators who have long worked toward this end. But now they must figure out how to help students lead fulfilling social lives without alcohol — a substance which, like it or not, is entangled with many colleges’ bottom lines.
The sober movement’s roots formed long ago. It might not feel like it, but student drinking has been on a downward turn for the last four decades.
In 1981, 82 percent of students reported drinking in the previous 30 days. In 2021, that figure was less than 60 percent. The data come from the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future survey, which experts say is a reliable measure of students’ alcohol consumption. Students’ participation in drinking trended downward until about 1997 and has continued to decline slightly since then.
About 44 percent of students in 1981 self-reported binge drinking in the previous two weeks, according to the survey. In 2020, when many college students were home because of the pandemic, the binge-drinking rate fell to 24 percent, but it bounced back to 30 percent in 2021. Binge drinking is defined as having five or more drinks in one sitting.
Duncan B. Clark, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on adolescent substance use, said there was a significant drop in alcohol use in the 1980s after Congress made 21 the minimum drinking age. Since then, “a lot of the rates have been fairly stable,” he said.
“Seven years after most states increased the legal drinking age to 21, college officials are still wrestling with how to respond,” The Chronicle declared in 1990. “Some are trying to stamp out underage drinking on their campuses, while others say a more realistic approach is to acknowledge that students use alcohol and to encourage them not to abuse it.”
Over the past 40 years, colleges have poured millions of dollars into alcohol-education programs, health-promotion centers, and collegiate-recovery communities. They’ve invested time and money into hiring staff to oversee these efforts.
These interventions have worked to an extent. Recovery programs continue to pop up all over the country to support students healing from substance-use issues. At the same time, alcohol-education programs are a mixed bag, with the benefits wearing off over time.
And while binge-drinking behavior has slowed, it remains a major concern of college leaders, who fear that students will die from alcohol poisoning. Each death brings renewed calls for institutions to crack down on alcohol culture and hold the groups that cultivate it accountable.
These administrators may be relieved to learn, then, that there’s a nascent movement of college students turning down the red Solo cup.
While young people have many personal reasons for making the choice, confluent forces — a more inclusive society, a stronger safety net for those struggling with addiction, and increased skepticism toward alcohol — have made it easier than ever to be a college student who doesn’t drink.
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
Students converse as they lace up their skates during a sober skating event
That cuts against the conventional campus wisdom that students who abstain are just alcoholics. The substance-free community is made up of people with various reasons for not using alcohol and drugs, said Lindsay Garcia, who oversees Brown University’s Donovan Program for Recovery and Substance-Free Initiatives.
“Some people just want to study really hard,” Garcia said. “Some people have family history of addiction; some people are in recovery. People have religious reasons or personal reasons or medical reasons.”
Society has, in recent years, become more willing to embrace and organize around the sober lifestyle, Clark, of the University of Pittsburgh, said. He pointed to Dry January, a popular health campaign that encourages people to take a break from drinking in the new year.
More bars are offering “mocktails,” or nonalcoholic cocktails. Headlines declare that alcohol just isn’t cool anymore. The “sober curious” movement has spawned a cottage industry of podcasts, books, and social groups designed to uplift people who are questioning their relationship with alcohol.
People are also more attuned to the research on the negative health effects of alcohol, said Lynsey Romo, an associate professor of communications at North Carolina State University who studies how people talk about alcoholism and sobriety.
“All of a sudden, everything is ‘sober curious,’” Romo said. “Every single news outlet is writing about this.”
On campus, demographic shifts may be amplifying the sober wave.
Students today are more diverse, and research shows that students of color and first-generation students are less likely to drink excessively. Today’s college students are also more open-minded toward people who are different from them, and that’s reflected in the greater acceptance of those who choose not to drink.
“A lot of students coming in are really seeking to align with their values, seeking activities that allow them to grow,” she said. “This incoming student population is reflecting a lot more about that, and there’s a lot more awareness of the adverse effects of alcohol and consequences.”
One of the largest shifts in higher education over the past 20 years has been the increasing pressure on colleges to offer full services to their students. Many students today arrive on campus with the expectation that their institution provides not only academics, housing, and food, but also medical care, security services, and mental-health support.
In that vein, collegiate-recovery programs have sprouted across the United States. They offer sober housing, social events, and connections to community services. According to its website, the Association of Recovery in Higher Education has 152 member institutions worldwide.
At Michigan, most of the recovery program’s events are only for students in the close-knit group. But in addition to St. Patrick’s Day skating, the program hosts an annual sober tailgate, which is open to the public. For students who don’t enjoy drinking or partying, events like these prove that they’re not alone.
“I don’t really like parties,” said Wencke Groeneveld, a Michigan student who attended Sober Skate. “I prefer physical activity, and I am a big fan of ice-skating. Even when I go to parties, I don’t drink. But it’s a little bit weird because other people are drinking.”
And for students who do enjoy going out, the prospect of free pizza and ice-skating may be enough to lure them away from the party scene.
“Without alternatives like this, people will just get drunk,” said Maya Castleberry, a Michigan graduate who attended the event. “There’s a huge turnout. People see that ice-skating is more fun than drinking.”
Recovery programs only serve a subset of students who abstain, and those students’ needs are different. But just the presence of a collegiate-recovery program on campus helps normalize the experience of being a college student who doesn’t drink, Statman said.
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
Matt Statman, manager of the Collegiate Recovery Program at the University of Michigan
“Campuses that really are invested in collegiate recovery and raise up students in recovery do something to help normalize sober students, whether they’re in recovery or not, or need to be in recovery or not,” Statman said.
Some campuses have student-run clubs that host alcohol- and drug-free activities, like Bucknell University’s C.A.L.V.I.N. & H.O.B.B.E.S. and Brown University’s SoBear.
Madhu Subramanian, a senior at Brown and president of SoBear, said that while club events are designed for people who are substance-free, it is not a requirement.
“You just have to remain sober right before, and during,” Subramanian said. “I think we provide a really good avenue for people who, for whatever reason, might just want a space that doesn’t have substances for a night.”
SoBear’s spring 2023 schedule includes bookmark weaving and tote-bag decorating. Events typically draw between 20 and 30 students, Subramanian said. Once, a mocktail-and-movie night attracted 180 people. “Last week we created potted felt succulents,” he said. “Last semester we went to Dave & Buster’s.”
Sober students at Brown gather in several different ways, including through substance-free housing.
Requests to live in first-year substance-free housing have tripled since the beginning of the pandemic, Garcia said. When she assumed the position, in January 2021, participation in the collegiate-recovery program had dwindled to three or four active members. Now, it’s between 30 and 40.
Subramanian lives in Donovan House, a 17-bed residence for sober students.
“Everyone in the house is there for different reasons, but all of us completely respect each other’s reasons for not wanting to interact with substances,” he said.
“I wanted to create a space and awareness that binge-drinking culture is not required to have a good college experience,” said Julie Lawton, a sophomore at the University of Connecticut who runs a health-and-fitness TikTok account.
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
Natalie Christian, a recovery-support assistant and graduate of the University of Michigan
Lawton said social media helps people who choose not to drink feel less lonely.
“If people didn’t have social media, they’d look around in college and think everyone’s drinking,” she said. “The only reason people know that I don’t drink is because of my social media.”
When Lawton started college, she noticed how normalized drinking was at Connecticut. There wasn’t much to do in Storrs, she said, besides drink and party.
So she’d drink, but it didn’t make her feel good. Lawton said she’d get really bad “hangxiety,” which she defined as the anxiety one feels the morning after drinking, when you can’t remember who you talked to or what you said.
At the beginning of her sophomore year, Lawton decided to try going out sober. She didn’t tell anyone and made sure to have a nonalcoholic drink in her hand. “I felt like I had a lot more confidence sober,” she said.
But the frat parties aren’t clearing out just yet.
While sober students have found support and community, they still struggle to navigate their peers’ expectations around drinking.
“I am comfortable talking about it,” said Claire Fogarty, a junior at the University of Southern California, of her sobriety. “People don’t know my relationship with it. But it isn’t something you’re supposed to ask people about.”
Colleges are still playing catch-up on creating better sober spaces that work for students. Campus-sponsored events often end before the weekend-night revelry even begins.
“The administration can only do so much when it comes to student culture, because that’s something that takes years to change,” said Kacey Lee, a sophomore at Cornell University. “But I do wish they would implement night events or concerts or open-mic nights, low-key things at night so that there’s things for students to do without alcohol.”
Not having alternatives is especially difficult for students in recovery, who often have to choose between going out sober and staying in.
“College is not a recovery-enhancing environment,” said Katie Carroll, a Michigan senior and member of its Collegiate Recovery Program. “I’d love to say it’s as common to find sober activities as it is ones where drinking is involved, but it isn’t.”
At Michigan, part of the success of the skating event was that it was so late, running from 10 p.m. to midnight. When asked what their plans were for the rest of the night, most attendees said they would go to bed.
“I’ve come to college to study and get a degree, so it’s better that there’s an event that doesn’t involve alcohol,” said Pranav Varshney, a Michigan freshman. Ice-skating is “not going to make me feel bad the next day, and I can go back to studying.”
Hosting better substance-free events is one thing; changing attitudes and behavior around drinking is another.
Alcohol consumption is so entrenched in the public imagination of college life that its absence is newsworthy; we question why students do not drink, not why they do. And the functioning of the college relies, financially and otherwise, on the assumption that students will drink.
Institutions attract students by promising both academic and social nourishment, but the responsibility of engaging students often falls to Greek-life organizations and other student clubs where booze reigns supreme. Colleges reap the benefits: In 2021, a Gallup poll commissioned by the National Panhellenic Conference and the North American Interfraternity Council found that fraternity and sorority members were much more likely to report donating to their alma mater than unaffiliated alumni — 54 percent versus 10 percent. Former fraternity and sorority members were also more likely than unaffiliated alumni to recommend their institution to others.
These groups remain embroiled in alcohol-related hazing scandals. About 1,500 college students between 18 and 24 die from alcohol-related causes each year, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
“Although alcohol use has decreased over time, it still remains — by far — the most prevalent substance used on college campuses,” said Megan Patrick, a research professor at the University of Michigan and principal investigator on the Monitoring the Future study, in an email to The Chronicle.
And a recent TikTok trend that recommends mixing water, liquor, flavoring, and electrolytes in a gallon jug is a new stressor for administrators. Advocates of the borg (“blackout rage gallon”) argue that the concoction reduces harm, because drinkers control what goes in their jug. That’s not so reassuring to colleges.
Photo by Michael Theis, The Chronicle
A borg — “blackout rage gallon” — is a cocktail of spirits such as vodka, Kool-Aid, and electrolyte solutions drank from a repurposed gallon jug.
In March, during the annual “Blarney Blowout” binge-drinking event, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Town of Amherst released a joint statement alerting the community to the use of borgs. The Amherst Fire Department received 28 requests for ambulance transport during the event. Officials planned to “assess this weekend’s developments and consider steps to improve alcohol education and intervention.”
Marijuana use, meanwhile, has been rising steadily since the mid-aughts. In 2021, 24 percent of college students said they had used marijuana in the last month, according to Monitoring the Future data.
Statman, at the University of Michigan, said he has noticed an uptick in cannabis use as Michigan has legalized recreational use and dispensaries have opened within walking distance of campus.
“That’s affected the culture for sure around substance use,” he said. He said he didn’t have the numbers, but “I think it’s safe to say that more people are using cannabis than they were before you could go buy it at the store.”
There’s reason to be optimistic, though, about the trajectory of alcohol-free life on campus.
“All the positive trends that we’re seeing point to a safer campus in terms of alcohol use,” said Julia Martinez, an expert on college drinking and an associate professor of psychology at Colgate University.
Clark, the Pitt psychiatrist, said he welcomes the greater acceptance of sobriety on campus and the shift toward a more expansive definition of college fun.
“What is fairly ingrained in our culture is that being a college student is associated with alcohol and other drugs,” Clark said. “That’s proven to be a problematic expectation.”
Instead of embracing these expectations, college students today are charting their own paths.
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
Students at a sober skating event
“People talk about this current generation like they don’t take on any risks,” Martinez said. “I would really want to emphasize that younger people are putting their foot down and are saying, ‘We don’t have to do the status quo.’”
In the lobby as the Michigan event waned, Bella Nuce, who graduated in 2021, reflected on the four years she has attended Sober Skate. When the 25-year-old first started going, it was much smaller, mostly fellow students in recovery. Now, it’s everyone.
She credited “a younger generation that’s more mature than me” for increasing Sober Skate’s popularity.
Meanwhile on the ice, Justine Sedky, who earned her master’s from Michigan in 2020, danced in anticipation of midnight. At that time, she would celebrate her fifth sober anniversary. Her peers whooped as the minutes counted down.
Of course, there would be no clinking of glasses when the clock struck midnight. Statman, the recovery-program manager, made just one request, tongue in cheek, as Sedky’s big moment approached: “Don’t drink.”
Oct. 18, 2022 – This just in: College students drink, use drugs, and break the law.
OK, so that’s not exactly news. But this is: A “fear of missing out” – playfully termed FOMO in the social media era – can predict these bad behaviors with surprising accuracy. That’s what researchers from Southern Connecticut State University found in a new study published in PLOS One.
After surveying 472 undergrads (ages 18 to 24), researchers found that students with higher levels of FOMO were more likely to engage in academic misconduct, drug and alcohol use, and breaking the law.
FOMO is the “chronic apprehension that one is missing rewarding/fun experiences peers are experiencing,” the paper says. It’s most common between ages 18 and 34, but anyone can feel it – and most people (nearly 90%) have.
“Almost all of us experience FOMO with most hopefully not engaging in any serious maladaptive, dangerous, or illegal behavior,” says Paul McKee, a PhD student in the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program at Duke University and the study’s lead author. “That being said, there is evidence, in this study and others, that those with higher levels of FOMO may be more likely to experience negative mental health consequences like increased anxiety or depression, or engage in less-than-desired behaviors.”
Students in the study completed a 10-question quiz designed to assess FOMO levels. They were asked to rate on a 1-to-5 scale how true each of the following statements were:
1. I fear others have more rewarding experiences than me.
2. I fear my friends have more rewarding experiences than me.
3. I get worried when I find out my friends are having fun without me.
4. I get anxious when I don’t know what my friends are up to.
5. It is important that I understand my friends’ “in jokes.”
6. Sometimes, I wonder if I spend too much time keeping up with what is going on.
7. It bothers me when I miss an opportunity to meet up with friends.
8. When I have a good time, it is important for me to share the details online (e.g. updating status).
9. When I miss out on a planned get-together, it bothers me.
10. When I go on vacation, I continue to keep tabs on what my friends are doing.
The higher a student’s average FOMO score, the more likely they were to have engaged in bad behaviors.
“Maladaptive behaviors were more likely for someone with a 3 than a 2, but even more so likely for a 4 compared to the 3,” says McKee.
Those behaviors included classroom incivility (like using your cellphone during class), plagiarism, alcohol and drug use, stealing, and giving out illegal and prescription drugs. And the associations remained even after controlling for gender, living situation, and social and economic status.
In the end, the researchers were able to use FOMO to predict whether a student would engage in academic misconduct with up to 87% accuracy, drug use with up to 78% accuracy, illegal behavior with up to 75% accuracy, and alcohol use with up to 73% accuracy.
That’s impressive, especially when you consider that a short, simple screening – including the 10 questions above — could be all it takes to predict these behaviors, McKee notes.
The new study fits with previous research that has linked FOMO with negative outcomes like anxiety disorders, sleep problems, and higher alcohol use.
Research also links FOMO with social media use.
“There is enough literature out there today that shows strong evidence of a bi-directional relationship between FOMO and social media use,” McKee says. In other words, “FOMO may lead to more social media use, but more social media use may also lead to FOMO.”
More research is needed to better understand the link between FOMO and behavior, the researchers say. That could help us reduce its potential harms.
