We probably all know at least one person at Brown who has—or has had—a fake ID. In fact, let’s be honest, many of us wouldn’t have to look much further than ourselves.

Of course, underage drinking is not exactly breaking news, especially among college students. But combine Brown’s notoriously lax policies toward drinking, a practically unique residential peer advising system, and a city like Providence where, in the words of one student, “You can pretty much get away with anything,” and you have a different story.

“Pretty much everyone I know has had a fake ID at some point,” says one Brown student. She got her first during the second semester of her freshman year from someone who made them on campus.

“I guess you don’t really need one, especially freshman year. I’m sure I mostly just used it for Fish Co,” she says. Still, she adds that, “When my friends started turning 21, I sort of felt like I did need one because then if you didn’t have one, it kind of meant that you weren’t included in everything.”

One male freshman, who acquired his fake ID before coming to Brown, says, “It’s not really that important, but definitely plays a role in your social life.” For him, and many others, being “legal” is helpful mostly on weekday nights, when campus life is quieter and bars, as he says, “Are kind of the only options.”

“I mean, I got an ID for a bunch of reasons,” says one sophomore, “But I think the main draw freshman year was being able to go to Fish Co.”

Infamously lenient on IDs and therefore a popular destination for Brown’s underage on Wednesday nights, Fish Co. perhaps epitomizes underage drinking in Providence. “I’ve always just found it funny what people get away with here. Especially at Fish Co.,” says the student.

Ask nearly anyone on campus about getting into Fish Co. underage, and you’re bound to hear a veritable anthology of barely believable tales. Everyone seems to have “a friend” who has gotten in with everything from a Brown ID to the expired driver’s license of a 28-year-old, an ID belonging to the opposite sex or an ID with an address ending simply in “Long Island”.

“One of my friends got into Fish Co. with a photocopied passport, and then, right after, another friend got in with a photocopy of that photocopy,” says one student. Another recalled being “talked into Viva” without an ID. “I think our friend pretended that we were all foreign exchange students who didn’t speak English.” She jokes that “you could get into Fish Co. with a piece of paper that says you’re 21,” but adds, more seriously, that “You do usually have to show something. It just doesn’t have to be something good.”

“Providence is very lax as a city,” says one freshman, who’s used his brother’s expired license all year without incident. “I mean, it’s also easier if you’re a pretty girl,” he adds, a sentiment that many seem to share. “I’ve always sort of felt like that’s the case,” says one female junior. “I’ve had IDs turned down and taken before, but I mean, I’ve never had a good one. I usually just borrow a friend’s and I get into bars here most of the time.”

Errbody in the club gettin’ tipsy?

But Brown’s social scene involves a somewhat unique blend of campus and city that enables students to strike their own balance between on- and off-campus activities, something that is less possible at schools in more rural or urban locations. Providence nightlife can offer an alternative to a slow night on campus or satisfy that need for a break from the beer-drenched floors of Wriston, but it’s not so alluring that campus life suffers.

According to a junior who spent two years at Columbia before transferring to Whitman College, “The drinking scene at Columbia is definitely, definitely centered around bars.”

She puts Columbia at almost at the other end of the spectrum from Brown, saying that Columbia’s administration made it difficult for students to host parties on campus, and that the school’s New York City location quickly drove drinking off campus and into the city.

“Pretty much everyone had an ID. You had to. You really couldn’t go out to the bars without one, and campus life was pretty uninteresting most of the time, so if you didn’t have an ID it was hard to find things to do,” she says. “There was definitely pressure to have an ID.”

It seems that, at least at Columbia, students will go to desperate measures to find — or make — fake IDs and obtain alcohol underage. “One of my roommates even scanned her passport so that she could change some of the numbers using Photoshop, and printed out a copy to use as ID,” the student explains. “Most bars turned it down, but it did actually work at a bunch of them.”

Before she and her friends got their fake IDs, she says they would usually ask older friends to provide alcohol. Then, “One night, none of our friends were around, so we had one of our friends ask a homeless man who was sitting outside the liquor store to buy us alcohol if we let him keep the change.”

At schools like Harvard, there seems to be even less of a need. “There’s no issue getting alcohol,” one sophomore says, and only some students — he estimates “40-60 at the absolute most” — have fake IDs. “I just wanted an ID so I could go to clubs and bars,” he says, but admits that, “It’s kind of hard to use in Boston. It’s pretty strict.”

He says that in Cambridge, where bars tend to be strict about IDs and close by 2 A.M., a lot of after hours alcohol consumption takes place either on campus or at final clubs – semi-exclusive social clubs that, though essentially integrated into Harvard’s campus, are completely independent of the university itself and, not subject to university regulations, can host parties well past the 2 A.M. curfew.“[Final clubs] basically can do whatever the hell they want,” says the student. “They are essentially places where there are no rules and…where alcohol flows very liberally and massive amounts of drinking happen.”

Similarly, a sophomore at Smith College says that it isn’t really necessary to have a fake ID to have a good social life at the Five Colleges.“A lot of people don’t have them, and if they do, the IDs tend to be kind of shitty, so they don’t always work,” she says.

Still, like most, she acknowledges that having a fake ID included her in the activities of upperclassmen and was useful, in more ways than one.

“I was sort of with this guy from Amherst [College] who was a senior. It got kind of difficult to go out with him on weekends because he usually wanted to go to bars and I couldn’t go because I wasn’t 21,” she says. “Once I got an ID, it became so much easier to hang out with him. I kind of felt like getting a fake ID was the best thing that happened to our relationship.”

Reslife Does Something Right

But what seems to really separate Brown students’ drinking habits from their peers’ at other schools are the attitudes that shape administrative and residential life policies. Unlike at Harvard, where all incoming freshman go through what one student called “the usual stupid alcohol training,” or at Smith and Columbia, where AlcoholEDU is a requirement for incoming freshmen, Brown does not require the completion of any alcohol education programming aside from the “mandatory” talk given during freshman orientation.

And, as anyone who has lived on-campus can attest, Brown’s residential peer leadership program stresses peer advising, as opposed to a fault system when it comes to issues like drugs and alcohol. One freshman says he feels there are feelings of “mutual respect” between residents and RPLs, and that because of these positive relationships, “When [RPLs] tell you to do something, you listen.”

One former Columbia student complains that overly strict and putative policies toward alcohol in campus dormitories did more harm than good. She says that during her freshman year, residents on her hall threw a party where there was alcohol in a common space, and ended up getting caught by an RA. Because of the school’s policies on parties and drinking in dorms, she said, “One girl stepped up to the blame, even though she wasn’t really that involved in the party, pretty much just because the RAs said they had to cite someone for the offense, otherwise they would get in trouble with Res Life.”

She adds, “The RA’s didn’t care about the party. It was completely senseless.”

So Brown may be on the right track: students, both at Brown and at other schools, seem to uniformly praise our system for creating an open and safe culture toward drinking. “It’s college. It’s gonna happen,” says one student. “And I think Brown does a really good job dealing with it.”

A Harvard sophomore reports that the university has been becoming more lax toward punishing its students for alcohol-related offenses, having recently instituted an amnesty policy for calling health services in drinking-related incidents. “I’m glad that’s changing,” he says. “Especially in regards to drinking, the trend of self-sufficiency at Harvard can be damaging.

Citing a recently published article in the Harvard Crimson, he says that “Students coming into Harvard, compared to the national average, have drunk less than their peers before coming to school, but by the time they graduate, are at the national average for college students.” In freshman year, as one student puts it, “People just don’t know how to drink yet.”

“I think when you have underage students drinking in secretive or underground ways, people end up doing stupid things,” says another. At Brown, “I don’t think that any of this makes people drink more, but I think you see it more because it’s out in the open. If people want to drink, they’re still going to drink. I don’t think a stricter system would change that.”

Whatever the case may be, whether you’re going show up at Fish Co. next Wednesday with that 35-year-old’s driver’s license you picked up off the floor at Liquid, or you’re actually 21, with a scanner-friendly ID to prove it, as one sophomore puts it, “We always manage.”