How Snooki's Partying Became A Problem

On last night’s episode of Jersey Shore, we watched Snooki’s binge drinking devolve to the point in which a young person’s dedication to a “good time” crosses into bad-time territory.

This is the kind of thing that doesn’t initially seem alarming, because everyone else is partying seemingly just as hard, like in college, or say, a summer down the shore. Because of the circumstances—in which a person is surrounded by a party-like atmosphere—there’s a thin line between over-use and abuse, and the result can be kind of a “situational alcoholism,” wherein the real problem mostly occurs in a certain type of environment. And after a few weeks in the house, Snooki’s roommates are beginning to realize that they hadn’t seen her sober in a long time. It was already too late for them to intervene when she was midway through a 24-hour bender, having gone out the night before, then showed up at work, hungover in a “cocktail” dress, and attempting to funnel a beer at 10:30 in the morning. She left work to do shots and down a Long Island Iced Tea. Immediately after work, she hit the bar, doing body shots with a middle-aged couple, and after that, she says, she blacked out.

What happened next was a spectacle, from the looks of it. Crowds of people were lined up on the boardwalk, watching the famous Jersey Shore girl rolling around on the beach before cops arrested her for public intoxication.