The Daily recently published an unusually flattering piece about the University’s prohibition of alcohol in freshmen common spaces(“New alcohol policy proves successful,” May 16). While a student newspaper reacting so positively to the administration is rare, facts supporting the article’s headline were even harder to find.

For too long, alcohol policy debates have been buttressed in anecdotes and unscientific qualitative measurements. Frankly, it does not matter what one resident assistant’s experiences over the course of one year; without systemic studies of alcohol consumption, overconsumption and culture, no one knows which policies make students lives safer.

Currently, the University and the Department of Public Safety collect alcohol-related statistics including: minors in possession, driving under the influence, alcohol-related misconduct and trips to the emergency room, all in terms of class year. Aside from the Stanford Police’s annual publication of the safety statistics, these statistics are not widely publicized and there is no part of the University administration that disseminates and publicizes a compilation of these statistics.

Stanford needs to stop downplaying less pleasant facts. For future alcohol policies to be successful, the student body has to understand and support them, and that will only happen through frank discussion that includes alcohol related statistics. A Stanford committee, such as the Alcohol Advisory Board should publish a yearly report detailing all available statistics, and the comparison to prior years would assist in building such a discussion.

So far, there have been some efforts to reach a similar goal. This year, the Alcohol Advisory Board did a series of focus group interviews among frosh to receive feedback on alcohol policies. Efforts such as focus groups are superior in receiving usable data with tangible solutions. But to be able to increase dialogue with the student body, the results of the focus groups needs to be distributed widely. Also, this process needs to be repeated every year in order to compare and assess the policies.

Discussions about the alcohol policy tend to create negative responses among students, as they always believe the University is out to get them. Generally this is not the case. But when discussing these sensitive topics, it is particularly important to be as truthful about the statistics as possible.

In retrospect, it seems that The Daily article was a bit presumptuous. As it stands, the data is not compiled in a way to comprehensively assess the policy’s success. However, through further broadening the efforts by the Alcohol Advisory Board, a measurement can be developed. We hope that Stanford’s alcohol policy has succeeded in making the University a safer campus; we’d just like to see some numbers to back it up.