Story Photos
 Kelso High School seniors and members of the school's Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) club members play ping-pong and checkers drinking games at school. From top left clockwise are Kelsey Engebo, Mitchell Tate, Jesse Mueller, Derrick Deen and Tayler Mustion. Greg Ebersole / The Daily News
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Lose the drinking games, locals urge Fred Meyer
Friday, November 9, 2007 8:21 AM PST
By Carrie Pederson
Printable version
E-mail this articleOn Monday, a group of teenagers gathered at Kelso High School for some after-school partying.
They played games like Drinko and Keg Pong and raised shot glasses and plastic "kegger" cups.
"I'm on my way to the hospital after eight shots," stated Kelso senior Mitchell Tate, 18, acting like he was hammered.
He wasn't really, though, and this wasn't a real kegger.
The students are members of Kelso High School's Students Against Destructive Decisions Club, and the glasses and cups were empty.
Brian McCrady of the Cowlitz Substance Abuse Coalition brough the students together to raised awareness to the coalition's month-old campaign to convince Fred Meyer to yank drinking games off its shelves.
Such games "express blatant disregard for the dangers of alcohol poisoning and promote alcohol abuse," Brian McCrady wrote in a Oct. 22 letter to Fred Meyer's corporate office in Portland.
So far, though, the effort has fallen flat.
McCrady said Fred Meyer has not returned his calls to follow up on the letter.
"I told him I will take it to (the management committee meeting) next Tuesday and they will be talking about it further from there," Fred Meyer spokeswoman Melinda Merrill said Wednesday. "We will look at the problems in where it's being sold and what's being sold. We take all those problems very seriously."
A spot check by McCrady and a reporter found that Fred Meyer is the only store in the area offering drinking games.
A national letter-writing campaign pressured Kohl's and Linens-n-Things to pull drinking games off their shelves earlier this year. And Target discontinued selling the games through its Web site, said Eric Helmuth, director of internet communication of Join Together, an alcohol prevention advocacy group and part of the Boston University School of Public Health.
"We have a large database and an online petition form that e-mailed Kohl's customer service directly. Several thousand did and Kohl's responded within two days," Helmuth said.
"Our concern with the drinking games is that their only purpose is to encourage hazardous drinking," he said. They are also geared towards underage drinkers because they are based on college drinking games, "but regardless of the person age it's not good to drink eight shots of liquor," he said.
Directions of one drinking game McCrady bought at Fred Meyer called "Drinko" state the winner is "last man or woman standing."
"If you play this game for a half-hour, you're gone," McCrady said of Drinko. "Someone's got to drink every time."
McCrady said he began campaigning against the games when he spotted them near kitchen glassware in Fred Meyer. Oregon Partnership, a Portland-based non-profit that promotes awareness about drug and alcohol abuse, may join the effort.
"We're going to wait and see if Brian and his folks get response from Fred Meyer," said Pete Schulberg, communication director for Oregon Partnership. "Depending on what happens, we might join the bandwagon too."
Drinko is played like Plinko on "The Price is Right" TV game show. Plastic balls are dropped through metal pegs. If is lands in the cup of another player, they drink; If it lands in your cup, you drink.
McCrady says such games further encourage underage drinking, which already is a problem in some area schools, according to youth surveys.
At the meeting on Monday, senior Derrick Deen said he was unimpressed with the games. "It's the most pointless game. It's a tiny pingpong table," he said of Keg Pong, which requires players to bounce pingpong balls over a little net and try to get it in the opponent's cup.
"Alright, pound it," said senior Tayler Mustion, when he finally got his ball in the Keg Pong cup of his opponent, senior Kelsey Engebo.
"These games are easy to imitate," Mustion said. "All you really need to play the game is a table and some tape."
Even if students don't buy the games, they could get ideas while they are shopping, Deen said. "Anything that would enhance drinking, they would use."
The games all sell for under $20 and there is no age restriction on their purhcase, McCrady said.
Shellee Brassard, Kelso High School's prevention and invention specialist, sent her 19-year-old daughter to purchase a drinking game called Beer! at a Zumiez store in Portland just to see if she would be stopped
The $5 game is advertised as a "hilarious game where you assign drinks, steal from each other, have blackouts and even an occasional drunken hook-up."
Cowlitz Substance Abuse Coalition only is focused on taking games off shelves in local stores, McCrady said.
Brassard said she has heard students speaking out against the drinking games being sold in retail stores. "(Young people) have choices in places to shop," she said.
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