Last weekend was pretty much the quintessential Dartmouth weekend.
A cocaine scandal erupted in the pages of The D on Friday, with felony charges raining upon our friends, acquaintances. The Sphinx popped bottles to celebrate its 125th anniversary, showering self-congratulation upon itself. Rumors that the Hanover Police would announce more arrests and press charges against six Greek houses swirled, while the liquor flowed.Cocaine, confetti and a hazy horizon of consequences: Another weekend at the oasis/mirage/College. Smooth kegs and DJ Interchangeable, 11-2, BE THERE.
I don't think this latest scandal has come as a surprise to anyone. Not to me, anyway. As a Drug and Alcohol Peer Advisor I'm well acquainted with the statistics and information; as a human I'm well acquainted with reality.
There are drugs at Dartmouth. There are a lot of drugs at Dartmouth. Their prevalence is about the same as on any campus, though.
What is more concerning, and what I believe is different at Dartmouth than at other colleges, is the culture of addiction.I am talking mainly about alcohol. This is a dead horse, I know. Blah blah blah Dartmouth people are drunks blah blah frats blah blackouts whatever. One of the directives for this, the Senior Issue, was to write that column you've always wanted to. Well, I've never wanted to write this one. But I think it's important.This place builds addicts.
I am not throwing stones. I have gone to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, on campus and off. I don't consider myself an alcoholic, and I'm not in recovery, but I'm watching myself closely, because I know it's in my blood.
It's in the way I don't want to stop drinking when I've had two glasses of wine. It's in the way my personality changes, when I'm hitting it hard. It's in the way I lay awake at night, shivering in a cold sweat, if I haven't had anything to drink in three days.I am not passing any kind of moral judgments about substances, their use, or abuse. What you do to your own body and why and what laws you break those are your decisions.But that's why I think we need to make those decisions more carefully. What I want everyone to know what I have learned the hard way, by talking for hours and hours with people who've been in and out of rehab, by reading the literature, by going to AA and training to be a DAPA is that when it comes to your brain, there comes a terrifying point when the decisions are no longer yours.
Welcome to addiction. You can open and close a decision like a pair of scissors in a split second and cut the ribbons to a new pathway that will exist in your brain, forever. Hello Cocaine. But marijuana, which so many college kids consider basically benign, can also be incredibly addictive. Weed changes your brain chemistry, and in the long term, your entire style of life. By far the most socially accepted though, and therefore most dangerous, is alcohol.
Even if all you are doing is drinking four or five or more beers, three or four days a week which is fairly average for a Dartmouth student you are rewiring your brain to depend on alcohol. You're already doing it, right now.
Just be aware of it, okay? Learning about your own brain is the most important thing you can learn about at this college. Figure this stuff out for yourself, for your own sake, and take it seriously.
It's been said that our mistakes are the only things we don't regret; that our mistakes are what we defend the most violently. Makes sense to me. Maybe that's why we all love to glorify our drinking culture so much: We know it's a mistake. We don't want to admit how bad it can get how bad it already is.
Just because most of us are successful young men and women with an arsenal of jokes about functional alcoholism does not mean that this is a joke. We've all seen many, many kids leave Dartmouth for rehab. Some come back. Others don't. In these four years I've watched people I know, and some I love, turn from adventurous kids to crippled addicts, in what feels like the blink of an eye.
All I'm asking is that you consider the ways your social life is constructed. The circles you travel in, and the long term influence that all of this can have, in combination with the addictive properties of these substances the split second decisions you might have to make, that you wouldn't even have been faced with, otherwise.
I've been thinking lately about one of the first days of my sophomore Summer, when a kid I had met once or twice tripped on too much acid.
He had a seizure, and ended up in the hospital. I don't think he ever came back to Dartmouth. I don't even remember his name.I do remember the way I felt though, that day: not surprised.I was sitting in the sun on that stonewall at the corner of School Street and West Wheelock, with a friend I have known since the sixth grade. The grass was so green, and the day was so beautiful, and the cars were whizzing by, up the hill. "God," I said.
She had been there. She'd seen him shaking uncontrollably on the floor, and the ambulance come, and everyone scrambling not to get arrested.
I didn't know what to say.
"I'm so sorry," I said finally, though I wish I had had something better to offer.
Sometimes all your decisions along the way good or bad amount to nothing but a wish that you could reverse time. For yourself, or someone else.
But you can't.
The cars kept flying by, and there was nothing else to say.
