I recently celebrated a birthday and while it was not a momentous one in my opinion, my friends apparently thought different. At the end of a string of late nights, I thought, I’m too old for this.

I wasn’t half wrong. According to a new study, my revelry was tame stuff compared to what 21-year-olds consider a rite of passage these days. University of Missouri researchers surveyed roughly 2,500 college students about the “21 at 21” or “power hour” drinking ritual, where the 21-year-olds head to a bar at midnight and drink 21 shots as fast as possible.

Researchers followed the students for four years, the length of their college stay, and found 34 percent of men and 24 percent of women consumed 21 or more drinks when they turned 21. Extrapolating from that data, researchers determined half of the men and more than a third of women who imbibed, held blood alcohol levels of 0.26 or higher, the amount where choking on vomit and serious injury can occur.

Rhode Island, North Dakota, Michigan, Texas, California, and New Mexico have reported deaths from these alcohol benders in the last five years. Lawmakers in Texas and North Dakota have proposed regulating when 21-year-olds can begin drinking.

One promising study of 316 students showed the group who received information about how alcohol affected blood alcohols and the rest of the body had blood alcohol level that were 25 percent than those who didn’t receive the Web-based interactive tool.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor