Study Finds College 'BORG' Drinking Jugs Produce More Blackouts, Not the Safety Promised

A gallon jug of vodka, water, flavoring and electrolytes, decorated with a pun and carried to a tailgate. That's a BORG, short for blackout rage gallon, and it's been a fixture of American college drinking culture since around 2020.

A new study published September 15, 2026, in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, a peer-reviewed publication housed at Rutgers University, put actual numbers behind the trend for the first time. The findings don't back up what college kids have been telling themselves.

What Students Said the Jug Was For

BORGs took off during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pitch, spread largely on TikTok, was simple: mix your own drink in your own sealed container, and you control exactly what's in it. No shared punch bowls, no risk of a spiked cup, no bacteria from a dozen strangers' hands.

Amelia McCoun, a licensed professional counselor at Texas Tech University, told Nexstar in 2023 that this logic had some real merit. Students who felt pressured to drink could build a BORG with little alcohol, or none, and nobody at the party would know the difference. That's a legitimate harm-reduction argument. McCoun also flagged the obvious danger at the time: an easily accessible jug pre-loaded with a large, unmeasured amount of alcohol is a binge-drinking risk waiting to happen.

What the Data Actually Shows

Lead researcher Andrea C. King, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago, surveyed more than 100 heavy-drinking college students from both private and public schools nationwide, according to the University of Chicago's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience. Her team compared students who had made a BORG in the past year against those who hadn't.

A single BORG can hold up to a fifth of liquor, roughly 17 standard drinks, King's research found. On a typical BORG outing, students reported consuming an average of 9.4 standard drinks by the end of the event, compared to 6.3 drinks on a non-BORG binge-drinking day, according to The Hill.

Nearly all participants, 98 percent, said they got buzzed or drunk, according to StudyFinds reporting on the study. Twenty-nine percent reported blacking out. Seventeen percent vomited. Fifty-nine percent said or did something embarrassing. The study also documented injuries and emergency room visits tied to BORG use, though it didn't specify a count.

And the supposed safety feature, the sealed personal container, didn't hold up either. Participants reported sharing sips of their BORGs and sampling others' mixes constantly, undercutting the entire pitch that started the trend.

"But the mixing of hard liquor and additive flavorings in BORGs may be particularly harmful given the sweetness of the beverage and the lure of sharing one's BORG and tasting others' concoctions," King said, according to the University of Chicago release.

Nobody's Quitting

Two-thirds of BORG users said they planned to make another one within the next year, according to StudyFinds, even after describing their own blackouts and embarrassing moments from the last one.

King isn't calling for a ban. "Having an open discussion can go a long way toward reducing harms at college," she said, adding that college conversation doesn't have to be all-or-none, per Vice's coverage of the study.

What to Weigh Before Drawing Big Conclusions

A fair caveat: King's sample was specifically heavy-drinking college students, not a random cross-section of the student body. That's a reasonable population to study if you're trying to measure harm among people already prone to binge drinking, but it means the results can't be stretched to claim BORGs are turning casual drinkers into blackout cases. The study also relies on self-reported survey data, which always carries some risk of over- or under-reporting embarrassing behavior.

Vice's writeup captured the numbers accurately but leaned into mockery of the trend rather than digging into King's actual policy suggestion, which is conversation and awareness, not prohibition. The University of Chicago release and the subsequent wire pickups from Access Newswire and WBOC-TV ran nearly identical text, all tracing back to the same University of Chicago-issued announcement rather than independent reporting.

Colleges aren't the ones who created this trend, and they can't legislate it away. Parents and students deciding what goes in a milk jug is still, ultimately, a personal choice with personal consequences. The question King's research leaves open is whether that "open discussion" actually changes behavior, given that two-thirds of users in her own sample said they're doing it again regardless of what happened last time.