Recent columns by Jacob Batchelor '12 ("Bad Sam," Feb. 20) and The Dartmouth Editorial Board ("A Worthy Cause," Feb. 6) have pointed to the need to reexamine the resources and policies of both the College and the Town of Hanover regarding alcohol and substance use.
I agree with Batchelor that Hanover's underage consumption policy must be changed to favor the safety of students, and I agree with the Editorial Board that we need more community support for students struggling with substance abuse. However, I also believe we should reexamine our own health habits, which are -- considering the knowledge and resources available to us -- surprisingly poor.
After three-and-a-half years at Dartmouth, I am still amazed by just how seriously we take the "work hard, play hard" mentality. "A Worthy Cause" makes an astute observation: "While many Dartmouth students use the slogan with an air of pride ... the truth underlying the motto is that an astonishingly large number of Dartmouth students behave in ways considered unsafe by most commonly accepted medical standards."
Although Dartmouth students like to take pride in how healthy and fit they are, this sense of pride belies a grimmer reality. We worry about some aspects of our health -- we work out (take a look at the Kresge Fitness Center at 4 p.m.), and eat lettuce and tofu (check out Collis after 10As) -- but we are, by and large, grossly negligent when it comes to other wellness goals. A disregard for "commonly accepted" health standards is so ingrained in our College lifestyle that we have become desensitized to unsafe behavior.
It's true that many of our questionable health habits are due to our packed schedules and inexorable lack of free time -- no matter how hard we try, or how many Novack energy drinks we down, each day will still have only 24 hours (even if we only sleep for four of them). But much of our negligence is also due to a remarkably casual willingness to gamble with our bodies.
Insufficient concern for our own well-being sometimes extends into insufficient consideration for others'. However, while our laxity in this respect is indeed a problem, I doubt that much of it is intentional. Instead, our carelessness results from some sense of complacence that we develop during our time at the College.
Many students have abandoned commonsense, self-explanatory health habits -- things which, when we are away from Dartmouth, often go without saying. Such habits include washing hands, not sharing cups with random people and abstaining from certain social or romantic activities when we are sick (don't go to a foam party with pinkeye -- it's been done before, and it did not turn out well). Combined with the less easily avoided pressures of a college lifestyle, our negligence is at least in part responsible for many of our ailments, including the waves of colds and stomach bugs that cross our campus every few weeks. If we keep it up, our carelessness could even result in more serious infections, like the norovirus outbreak at Georgetown last year, or the meningococcal meningitis cases at the University of Pennsylvania earlier this month.
We tend to be just as heedless about substance abuse -- especially alcohol, of course. Most of us find the medically accepted definition of binge drinking -- four drinks for women and five drinks for men, on a single occasion -- downright laughable, and are not too concerned about the short-term consequences of this level of consumption. Unfortunately, we all too often hold a similar attitude toward long-term alcohol abuse. We have to acknowledge that there are limits to the fun we can have without incurring lasting damage to our bodies. No amount of institutional support can save us from that.
Stress from classes, activities and job applications will never go away, and neither will our desire to have fun (nor should it). However, I wonder how many of the sacrifices we make to our health are really necessary, and how many of them come from a sense of invincibility. Maybe we should have outgrown that sense by now.
Staying healthy at Dartmouth is difficult enough as it is, but most of us could be trying a little harder. In the end, there is a limit to what institutions, policies and friends can do to keep us healthy and safe. Ultimately, the responsibility has to be our own.
