This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
It was 5:45 in the early hours of Tuesday December 13, 2016 when Newcastle University student Ed Farmer's unconscious body was delivered to the city's Royal Victoria Infirmary.
His clothes were soaking wet, part of his head had been shaved, and his blood-alcohol level was running at 400 milligrams of alcohol in every 100 milliliters of blood, over five times the legal drinking and driving limit. Doctors gave him a 1 to 2 percent chance of survival, but even that slim hope proved optimistic.
When he died the next day, Ed Farmer's official cause of death was recorded as "a hypoxic brain injury because his brain was deprived of oxygen due to cardiorespiratory arrest." What that means is that the excessive consumption of alcohol had led to fluid filling his lungs and starving his brain of oxygen. He was 20 years old.
The previous evening, Monday, December 12, had begun just like many other nights out in towns and cities up and down the country. Farmer, a freshman economics student who had previously attended the £31,000 [$39,160]-a-year Oakham School in Rutland, arrived at the Three Bulls Heads pub in Newcastle's Haymarket area at around 7:15 PM. He was there, along with between 30 to 40 of his fellow students, to take part in a pub crawl initiation to Newcastle University's Agriculture Society. Only male students had been invited on the night out, and had all been given the same instructions. They were to bring with them: "a 70 cl [750 ml] bottle of hard spirits, some money, no student ID, a train ticket, swimming goggles, a Kinder egg, and some lubricant."
The reason they had been told not to bring student ID was that the organizers were aware these sorts of initiations, involving heavy drinking, had already been banned by Newcastle University, and the students didn’t want to be linked to the institution in any way.
The group began the evening at the Three Bulls Heads in boisterous fashion by buying 100 vodka and oranges, which amounted to two or three drinks each. That set the tone for the night. After leaving the pub they went down an alley to swig from their own bottles of spirits. They then stumbled down Newgate Street to Beyond Bar, where they each had another four to six drinks. They then went to The Basement Trebles Bar, a student nightclub beneath The Charles Grey pub, which promotes a deal of three drinks for five dollars. The group was eventually asked to leave when two members instigated what they called a "lizard fight," which involved linking their belts together to tussle in a tug of war.
After leaving The Basement, the group made their way to a train station. As they walked they passed around intentionally unpleasant food, like chicken's feet and raw potatoes. CCTV footage shows that, by this point in the night, Farmer was already having trouble standing. He was carried off the train at West Jesmond and, despite it only being a ten-minute walk, was driven to Sanderson Road and the house of James Carr, the Agriculture Society chairman, who had organized the night.
At the house, the initiation ceremony took an even more extreme turn. Students apple-bobbed in containers of piss and alcohol, and freshman students were given cocktails of wine and milk to drink, before crawling to the garage to have their heads shaved. Some drank shots of vodka from a pig’s head, although Farmer was too drunk to even attempt to take part in this. Nevertheless, his head was partially shaved by a third-year student. He was snoring so heavily that the others assumed he'd simply fallen asleep. Sometime after midnight, he was left to sleep off the night’s excesses in a corridor of the house on Sanderson Road.
The heavy snoring, in fact, was a sign that Farmer’s airways were starting to become blocked with liquid. It was around 4 AM when the other students noticed that he had stopped breathing and put him into the recovery position. Carr, whose house they were in, later said that he was woken by another student saying they "needed to get Ed to the hospital." He added: "You don't consider the consequences unless something dramatic happens. Looking back now, I don't know what to say. I knew that it would not have been allowed by the school. I said I didn’t want it to happen. If I could turn back the clock it's a no-brainer."
Rather than calling an ambulance, the remaining students decided to carry Farmer into a car and drive him to the Royal Victoria Infirmary. By the time he arrived, Farmer had gone into cardiac arrest. Doctors said that if Farmer had been taken to hospital earlier and had arrived prior to the cardiac arrest it's possible he would have survived the night.
Speaking at the inquest at Newcastle Civic Center in October of 2018, Carr confirmed that the purpose of the night had been to introduce new members to the Agriculture Society by encouraging them to drink as much alcohol as possible. "The purpose of the event was, and it's an awful word, an initiation-style evening to welcome everyone into the society, but there was no requirement to turn up—you would still be included if you didn't go," he said. Asked whether freshman students were forced to drink such excessive quantities, he added: "I believe there would have been encouragement from older students, but it was not forceful. As a freshman, I felt pressure to drink, but I would not say I was forced."
At 6:40 AM on the Tuesday morning, less than an hour after Farmer arrived at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, his father Jeremy heard a vehicle coming up the driveway of his home in Leicester. Looking out through the window he saw that it was a police car.
"When the police had left the house, I was 99 percent certain that he would end up with brain damage," Jeremy Farmer would later tell Radio 4's Today program. "Helen, my wife, she was more optimistic. But certainly, when we got up to the Royal Victoria Infirmary they did say that he was in a very serious state. They’d done a brain scan and the brain was dead. So our reaction was well, in that case, turn him off. There is no point in keeping him alive."
In the US, deaths from equivalent hazing rituals are even more common than they are in the UK. Professor Hank Nuwer, the author of Hazing: Destroying Young Lives, is one of the country’s leading experts on the issue. According to statistics he collected, there were 40 deaths from hazing in the US between 2007 and 2017, with alcohol poisoning the leading cause of death. As a result, all but six US states now have some sort of anti-hazing law, while in ten states it's considered at least a misdemeanor or even a felony if the activities result in serious bodily harm.
Professor Nuwer tells me that he began writing and campaigning against hazing after the death of student John Davies at the University of Nevada, Reno, where Nuwer himself had been a postgraduate student and a rugby and baseball player. He recalls once intervening when he saw a young man "frothing at the mouth from slogging 190-proof grain alcohol."
Based on the experience of American states, Nuwer argues that "a university policy prohibiting initiations is not enough" but that laws can make a difference, as they make "people see these kinds of initiations as a criminal act." As he points out in regards to Ed Farmer, "Apparently, those who coerced Mr. Farmer into drinking too much thought of themselves consciously or otherwise as breaking rules, or they would have carried school identification."
Nuwer believes that strict legal punishments, such as those that exist in Florida and Pennsylvania—and can result in felony homicide charges and lengthy prison sentences for organizers of hazing—"certainly deter some youths, if only because they fear jail and a tarnished resume and Google's long memory."
However, what really needs to change in order to stop these kinds of deaths may go beyond the capabilities of law-makers or universities. Nuwer tells me that there needs to be a "paradigm shift in attitudes by a nation's students as a whole. There has not been the shame and condemnation attached to hazing by enough students to put a stop to these deaths—especially because chugging alcohol in a ritual is somehow seen as a heroic participation in an act of heroism."
For their part, Farmer's family did not seek to place the blame on his fellow students. Jeremy Farmer said: "We certainly don’t blame the students who were part of the initiation process. I think we don’t ultimately blame the university. It's just a lack of understanding on the university’s part of the problem that they had got, and I think it’s been quite a shock to them to understand the seriousness of the problem."
Ultimately, it is students themselves who need to look out for one another and take their responsibility for their own and other people's safety seriously. Ben Butler, a spokesperson for the alcohol advice charity Drinkaware, tells me that while traditionally British students have had a reputation for heavy drinking, that may be changing. "There's often an assumption that all college students want to drink alcohol, but it's not inevitable or a requirement that young people should drink alcohol just because they are going to college," he says. "In fact, more and more young people are choosing to drink less or not at all."
With Christmas party season already underway on the second anniversary of Farmer's death, Butler says it's important that all students understand that drinking to excess can carry serious and immediate risks. "Our bodies can only process one unit of alcohol an hour," he explains. "Drink a lot in a short space of time and the amount of alcohol in the blood can stop the body from working properly. It affects judgment and reasoning, meaning you are more likely to lose self-control or put yourself in a risky situation, which could lead to injury or accidents. It can also impair the memory."
If you are planning on going out and getting drunk, as part of an initiation ceremony or not, Butler offers the following advice: "Eat a proper meal before you go out, pace yourself with water or soft drinks and make plans in advance to get home with someone you trust."
And as the members of Newcastle University’s Agriculture Society learned, to Ed Farmer’s ultimate cost, if someone you're with has drank too much, then getting them medical help sooner rather than later is the true act of heroism.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Kevin Perry on Twitter.
from VICE https://ift.tt/2Lh4I9U
via cheap web hosting
No comments:
Post a Comment