THE DRUG OLYMPICS

A student living in a dorm room near mine overdoses, begins to seize
and is rushed to the emergency room. Two days later, I see him in the
social room laughing about it. Someone asks him if he's learned
anything:

"Oh, yeah, totally. I'm not touching that stuff again. No more
synthetics for me. Next time I'm using 'shrooms."

No big deal. Here at Reed College some students, after surviving an
overdose, will celebrate their brush with danger in what they take to
be the most obvious way -- by getting high once more. Others will
wait a few weeks or months before they take heavy drugs again.
Overall, far too many end up resuming their former level of use.

It's infuriating because often these people are classmates,
acquaintances or neighbors. I've told them the dangers, and I've
encouraged them to seek help. But then some time later they're
getting high again. And you have to wonder: Why won't they ever learn?

I think maybe I've hit the answer, something that has become clearer
to me as I have observed our college's recent attempt to educate
students about GHB.

GHB, or gamma hydroxybutyrate, is the drug de jour. It's a "happy"
drug (makes you euphoric); the high supposedly lasts for a long time,
it's cheap and it's apparently easy to make or buy off the Internet.
It's so new that no one seems to have thought to graduate it into the
controlled substance category. A student also told me GHB's good to
bring people down when they're having a bad acid trip or when they
can't get to sleep.

But, as the college has repeatedly tried to make clear, GHB is also
extremely dangerous -- potentially more dangerous than many other
drugs floating around campus. If you take just a pinch too much --
and you can never be sure what "too much" is since the drug's
production hasn't been regulated -- you may fall asleep, and nobody
will notice till you never wake up. GHB is also getting a reputation
as a date rape drug. It may be addictive, and -- to make matters
worse -- it's difficult for ER doctors to detect.

Or at least that's what the pamphlets I picked up in the cafeteria
say. To the drug users on campus, the pamphlets also seem to suggest
that instead of getting high you should spend your weekend watching
G-rated movies, putting on sunscreen and eating carrot sticks.

The users say the drug is safe -- and they have all kinds of theories
to prove it, ranging from "I have cranberry juice to protect me" to
"I made it myself so I know the dose" to "I've done it six times
before." If you're considering using the drug for the first time,
who're you going to trust? Your friends or some pamphlet?

If you're still not convinced it's safe, then just ask your nine
friends who are high; you know, the ones who keep asking you why
you're not.

Almost all drug users will say something like "It's my life, and I
can decide what I want to do with it. You can't stop me." This is
true -- if someone really wants to get wasted, there's only so much
you can do to try to prevent it. Which leads me back to my point: Why
is this happening?

As I see it, this is a case of peer pressure taken to the most
vicious degree. Around my campus there's been a whole new competitive
sport going on: "The Get-Messed-Up Olympics" where you compete to see
who can win the gold medal for heaviest amount of drug use. After
all, how many competitive sports do you know where controlled
substances -- far from being banned -- are not only encouraged but
are supposed to give you the edge you need for victory?

What to do? I honestly don't know. Whether it's binge drinking or
drug derring-do, what chance have we got against this deadly
competitive sport? One can only hope that responsible authorities on
college campuses like mine will not give up on getting the right
information in everyone's hands.