Jenice Armstrong: Drinking till they're green

HAVE GREEN BEER, will drink it.

And extremely large quantities of it, too.

Besides what's in their cups, you have to wonder what's in the heads of some hard-core partyers this time of year.

I'm all for celebrating St. Patrick's Day, but I've been watching some of the daylong drinking that's been going on these last two weekends, and it gives me pause, especially when I see small-framed women guzzling large quantities of brew that's going to have them praying to the porcelain goddess by nightfall. There's nothing wrong with having fun. I plan to have mine, too. But when the heavy drinking starts at noon, it's easy to get wasted before the sun goes down, and that's where the trouble starts.

"If you came to the 10-block radius surrounding Cottman and Frankford avenues on Saturday, you would have thought you were in New Orleans, not Philadelphia," a letter-writer complained recently in the Northeast Times. "With the Mardi Gras atmosphere, the Shamrock Shuttle brings more than 1,000 drunken teens, young adults and older adults."

Steve Schmidt of Mayfair added: "You would have seen people walking up and down Frankford Avenue, Cottman Avenue and side streets drinking open containers of alcohol. You would have seen vendors selling goods on corners without licenses, school buses driving around with drunken fools yelling and screaming out of the windows and throwing cups and trash out of the window. You would have seen people vomiting and urinating on my wall, and you would have seen a young man receiving oral sex from a nice 'Irish' girl. I say that she was Irish for her shirt read, 'Kiss me, I'm Irish.' This is not wanted or expected in any neighborhood."

That may have been an extreme example, but I've been on my share of pub crawls like the Erin Express and Shamrock Shuttle, and there's a feeling that since you're being responsible and not driving, you can guzzle away. Sadly, heavy-duty partying has become the new normal, according to alcohol-abuse specialists.

"It used to be that girls were much more careful. Now, it's who can drink the most, who has the best story to tell," said Janice Styer, clinical coordinator of adolescent and young-adult treatment programs at Caron Treatment Centers. "They want to be like the guys and drink themselves under the table. They put themselves in danger, and they don't even realize it . . . people telling them that they slept with somebody. There's no decision-making. It's all one big drunken blur.

"I almost wish the buses weren't there. [With them] you can do what you want to and crawl up the stairs, and that will make it OK," Styer added.

But for those who wind up at the Caron Treatment Center, it's not OK. Styer estimates that 98 percent of the females who make it there have been sexually assaulted, robbed, stranded, or had some other negative experience while under the influence of alcohol.

Thankfully, most folks never get that far.

"I have had my day," admitted Councilwoman Joan Krajewski, who on Thursday will introduce a resolution in Council calling on Spencer's Gifts to stop selling offensive Irish-themed merchandise such as T-shirts that say, "Instant Irishman: Just Add Alcohol" and "Irish Today: Hung Over Tomorrow."

"Sometimes I wondered how I even made it home," Krajewski added. "But we didn't act like that."

It makes you wonder what's behind all the drinking-until-you-puke thing - is it that women are just catching up to their male counterparts, or are they being influenced by TV shows like "Jersey Shore," "Real World" and "Girls Gone Wild"?

"Where it starts is beyond me. If you do say something, you're a prude," Krajewski told me.

Call me a prude, but throwing up green beer on somebody's stoop and waking up naked in a stranger's bed isn't worth it.

Send e-mail to heyjen@phillynews.com. My blog: www.philly.com/HeyJen.