Josh Imhof | features editor

As I skidded across a basketball court in a golf cart sporting a pair of drunk goggles, Dan Gittins’ reassuring words ran through my head.

“All [they do is] affect your peripheral vision and your depth perception the same way that alcohol would if you were driving,” he said. “[They don’t] affect your muscles and [they don’t] affect your judgment.”

While this was technically true, the battered cones in my wake said otherwise.

This week, DU Cares held the “Drunk Goggle Obstacle Course” event as part of their annual Alcohol Awareness Week.

Gittins, who is the associate director of DU Cares, said the goal of the program was to get students to have conversations about safe alcohol use and educate them on the dangers of it.

“It’s not going anywhere. I’m not trying to eliminate the issue. I just want to bring awareness to it,” he said.

At the obstacle course, each pair of goggles simulated something different. One pair made participants see as though they were moderately intoxicated, while another simulated someone whose blood alcohol content was twice the legal limit.

The latter posed the largest challenge. Objects were nowhere near where they appeared in the goggles. I attempted to poke the chest of one of my fellow Duke editors, but to his dismay, I missed and poked him in the stomach instead.

Sorry, Ben. 

Once I was in the cart, the pedal situation also proved difficult. Instead of one gas and one brake pedal, the goggles made it look like there were two of each. Lucky for me, I also had two extra legs.

Using my newly acquired limbs, I maneuvered around the track with immense difficulty. Minor turns required full concentration and even then I still hit cones.

But, when I was done, I got out of the cart safe and sound. I brought the drunk goggles back and went about the rest of my day.

For me, this was as far as the story went. For others, the issue has much larger consequences.

“A lot of people on my mom’s and dad’s side combined have died from alcohol abuse, if not drunk driving, so it definitely is a personal subject to me,” said Isabella Defilippo, who heads the DU Cares Peer Educator program with Gittins.

Defilippo was one of two students who helped run the event. The other, Sydni Ellis, had also been personally affected by drunk driving when one of her close friends lost his daughter to a drunk driver.

She said people don’t realize how close the issue may be to them.

“I really do believe everyone’s one step away from somebody who’s been affected by something like this,” Ellis said. “We obviously want students to explore and have fun, but there’s a limit that we want to make sure that they’re still okay academically and socially

I felt a shift in myself after these conversations.

It was easy to laugh at how weird the goggles felt or how there were multiple versions of everything in front of me, but a sobering thought crossed my mind.

My fun looking at my four feet was someone else’s distraction that led them to hit and kill someone with their car. The caution tape I drove through was a guardrail on the side of the road that sent me careening into a hillside. The Duke editor riding beside me was a loved one.

There are around 1 million people arrested for drunk driving in the United States annually, according to the CDC. Col. Jason McLaughlin, a Duquesne Public Safety Officer, said there are few incidents of drunk driving on campus, but that there will occasionally be incidents on surrounding roads.

He would rather intoxicated students call public safety than get behind a wheel, even if they are somewhere off campus.

“They’re gonna face consequences, but we’d rather them call us,” McLaughlin said. “Just call somebody. It’s not worth it.”

DU Cares will be hosting a Halloween Karaoke on Oct. 23 and a Soda Tasting on Oct. 24. More information can be found on the Duquesne Campus Link website.

Josh Imhof can be reached at imhofj@duq.edu