Good Evening.  This is a pivotal moment in this wet society.  I believe abusive drinking is not just a problem for colleges to deal with.  It's not just our wet campuses that are having a problem  with high risk drinking -- the problems of alcohol pervade our WHOLE society.   Our WET society.

Raheem Bath with his parents Catherine and Tom at high school graduation. June 1997.

My goal is not to eliminate drinking.  My goal is to reduce the incidence of high risk drinking.  Abusive Drinking.  What you are witnessing here today is not just another boring talk about alcohol.  What you are witnessing is the crest of a wave.  A wave that has been building for years.  And this wave is getting ready to break, over the next few years (I'm not sure how many years it will take). This wave is starting to break over the whole country.

People are slowly waking up to the fact that too many of our finest young people, too many of our most promising young people,  have died at the prime of life, and are still dying needlessly.  Maybe the pile of casualties has reached such a height that the red flags at the top of the heap of devastation can no longer be ignored.  Maybe one too many fathers or mothers, such as myself, have suffered the ultimate loss of an only son to alcohol.  Maybe one too many mothers such as myself  looked a little too deep into the WHY? WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?

Joel Spitalnick, Raheem Bath, Adam Carson on the way to the Prom.

One of the biggest problems in this society is that our young adults, all of you, have been programmed.  Like sheep, actually.  I know I am standing before the absolutely brightest minds in this country, possibly in the world.   Yet many of you, far too many,  take very scary risks with your life on a shockingly regular basis.  Why?  You are smart kids  ---  don't you want to live to get a shot at making your mark in the world?  Raheem didn't want to die.  Dying was definitely NOT in his plans.  I think my son drank to excess on occasion because he was programmed by the alcohol industry.

Let me give you an example of what I mean: I am going to describe a  BEER COMMERCIAL  --  you've all probably seen it.  I could use any beer commercial on television to illustrate the point I am making here:

It goes like this:   TWO GUYS ARE CAMPING IN THE WOODS.  They are hanging out, having a good time.  THE ONE GUY POPS THE TOP ON THE CAN OF BEER AND OUT THE WOODS, OUT OF NOWHERE, TWO BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMEN COME WALKING UP IN CUT OFF JEAN SHORTS.

Raheem and his girlfriend, Naomi Brown.

Now the reality of this happening is (in reality) zero.  It is a fantasy.  Believe me guys, it takes more than a beer to get a desirable woman interested in you.  But this is just one example of the awesomely artful advertising creations that we know as beer commercials.  What Madison avenue has done is to take every desirable aspect of life that you can imagine and tie it to beer.  Close and loving relationships, bonding with your friends and buddies, great sex, having attractive girlfriends and boyfriends, glamorous lifestyle, good health, rugged outdoor life, sports and athletics, cool cars - you name it - if it is something desirable in life - something that we all want for ourselves - then it has been tied to a beer commercial, it has been tied to beer.  The liquor industry spends well over a billion dollars a year to rope in  young viewers.  Especially young men among your age group here. Especially targeted are our 16 - 25 year old young men.  You can't watch a football game without watching 10 or 20 beer commercials.

This is subliminal programming.  This is subliminal programming at its most blatant and most sophisticated.  Why do we as a nation allow the alcohol industry to subliminally program our young people? Why do we allow the alcohol and tobacco industries to advertise their poisons to our children? Why do we allow it?   It all comes down to money.  It is just  GREED.  Just think of how filthy rich Anheuser-Busch is!  College students alone spend --- 5.5 billion dollars a year on alcohol. 5.5 billion! How mind boggling is that?  And that doesn't include what teenagers are spending.  It also doesn't include what the adults are spending - and I'll give you a hint - it's 10x as much.  The alcohol industry is very rich and very powerful .    ---    And they don't want anyone    ----   ANYONE -- messing with their game!   Approximately 90% of our legislators in Washington have accepted alcohol industry money.  They have the politicians in their pocket with the exception of a very few.  They have us all where they want us -- thinking that beer is going to do something positive for us.  They have brainwashed so many people to think that beer is the solution for our awkward or uncomfortable moments -- a solution for our awkward or uncomfortable feelings -- uncomfortable feelings that are so common.  In fact if you don't feel awkward and uncomfortable sometimes - you're not normal!!

And what is the solution??  What have you been taught??  OH yeah!!  BEER!  Beer is the answer.

By the time you figure out that it isn't the answer - in fact it is the PROBLEM (a big problem in this society)  you are older, wiser, more experienced, AND you had to figure it out for yourself.  Because if you look around you, what you see is --  you think that it is OK to drink, no big deal - because that is the way it is taught in our society for the most part.

Hopefully you can figure it out before something bad happens, something unimaginably horrible, like what happened to my son, Raheem.  Raheem's sister, Aleema,  a freshman here at Duke asked me just the other day, "Mom, how do you feel about Raheem being in that documentary (Wasted Youth)?"  All I could think was, "the question really should be, "How do I feel about my only son, my beautiful boy, being dead?"  It's not something you ever recover from, losing a child, especially a boy like Raheem.

It's sad for me to be standing here in front of you today.  It's sad because my only son became an unwitting victim of alcohol.

You are all precious lives, precious souls, whether it is something you have yet realized - it is the Truth.

Choices about harmful (supposedly fun) substances such as alcohol and drugs should be choices made with way more facts, education and savvy.  If all of you were presented with all of the facts about these mind altering chemicals, and the damage they cause, you would be able to weigh intelligently how the risks outweigh the perception of the perceived positives.  And the positives are only perceived!  This is a false perception to which a large proportion of our society is prey - and especially our young people are prey to these false perceptions - due to their lack of experience as to the true nature and destructive force of alcohol and drugs.  And it is hard to make a clear decision when you are being programmed by thousand upon thousands of beer commercials telling you alcohol is fun!!!! The liquor industry has one objective for airing those commercials.  To hook young people and hopefully make them a life long consumer of their highly addictive substances.

Security on Campus, the nationwide, non-profit victims' advocacy agency that I now work for - wants college students to be aware - we want you all to know that alcohol and drugs do affect your personal safety in so many ways - ways you cannot even imagine.  My son had an IQ of over 160 and he didn't know that his flu-like symptoms 3 days after a night of heavy drinking were caused by aspiration of stomach fluids in minute amounts into his lungs while he "slept it off" in his fraternity room.  This caused a type of pneumonia (aspiration pneumonia) which is much more deadly than your viral pneumonia.  After 7 days in the pulmonary intensive care unit here at Duke Medical center, after being on a ventilator for five days, Raheem died.  We were all there with him - my husband, and his two sisters.  Aleema and her older sister, had driven down from Philadelphia to north Carolina by themselves on Thanksgiving Day.   His sisters did not believe, until the moment of his death, that their brother could actually die.  They didn't think it could happen to our family.  Our happy family.  I didn't think it could happen to me .

Raheem, age 2 1/2, with his sisters.

What is society teaching you?  What did society teach my son? This is what they taught him -  Beer is the answer.  My son did figure it out, in fact his close friends told me, "Mrs. Bath, I can't believe this happened to Raheem!  He was leaving this whole scene behind." But it only took one night of binge drinking.  I know my son figured it out before he died.  The last thing he said to his close friend was, "If I make it through this I will never touch alcohol again."

Hopefully, you can figure it out before something bad happens.  The list of negative consequences of alcohol abuse is so long.  90% of student on student crime on college campuses is tied either indirectly of directly to alcohol.  Rape,  date rape, fights, assaults, accidents, falling off balconies, drowning, car accidents - all of these accidents are most often attributable to victims and/or perpetrators being under the influence of alcohol.

I am going to end with a verse sent to me anonymously, from Americas' biggest anonymous organization, an organization with so many members nationwide that I won't even give a number.

I am more powerful than the combined armies of the world;

I have destroyed more men than all the wars of the all the nations;

I have caused millions of accidents and wrecked more homes than all the floods, tornadoes and hurricanes put together;

I am the worlds' slickest thief.

I steal billions of dollars each year;

I find my victims among the rich and poor alike,

I am relentless, insidious, unpredictable;

I bring sickness, poverty and death;

I give nothing and take all;

I am your worst enemy;

I am alcohol.