FRESH WHITE POWDER AND GREEN TREES

Students Who Straddle The Razor Of Academic Success And Chemical Comfort

At the end of the semester, many of us were scrambling to excavate
ourselves from the holes we'd dug into. Whether high-strung, or just high
and strung out, it was time to hunker down. But breaking routine can mean
breaking concentration, and finals is not the time to lose focus. During
finals, I overheard a biology student in a cafe brag that over the last
three days, with a few pills, she'd neither slept nor put down her books.
Like many of us, she wasn't going to stagger through exams without some help.

Dr. Pierre Tellier, director of health services at McGill, acknowledges
that student drug use is rampant.

"There are a few who do get into trouble [using ecstasy]. There are a few
[using] meth-amphetamines... and cocaine," says Dr. Pierre Tellier.
"Cannabis is the number one drug, other than alcohol. Students commonly use
it to relax."

It's difficult to study when tense. Resolving to stay in and bear the brunt
of the books can, for many, mean getting jittery. So, call a pager, punch
in an account number and, like magic, a fellow student arrives at the door.
This person could be just another student on another bicycle, but their
knapsack does not carry any books. These aren't drug dealers. No, they're
simply potheads who've found an economically viable part-time job. In this
circumstance, there are two choices for sale: economic outdoor or the
bubonic-hydroponic-chronic. Prices are above street value, but this is
front-door service with a smile, and quality control is impeccable.

There are those, however, whose hobbies go much deeper than that. Follow
Syd, the joint-honours student, into a pharmacy to the prescription
counter, where he slaps a loonie down (all within a healthy student
budget), and asks for a prevention kit. The pharmacist grows nervous, her
face is flush, and she won't reach for the dollar until the rest of us at
the counter leave. This over-the-counter prevention kit includes five
alcohol swabs, five 1cc syringes, two condoms, and one education pamphlet
explaining where needles can be procured, exchanged, and safely disposed of.

"You go from being a potentially excellent student to an academically
mediocre one," Syd explains. "I think, just like most addicts, I'm
inherently better than most... That's like the ultimate justifying
rationality behind most addictions: that you can handle it, whereas most
people can't." With a paper due the next day, he's 'handling' it.

"At the same time, there is planning involved, like the fact that I made
sure that my paper wasn't going to be due for another three, four, five
days... The fact is I would still rather get a B+ in this class, than a C+
or a B-," Syd continues, emptying 1/16 g of cocaine into a spoonful of water.

"Now, if I was a junkie addict with no source of parameter of behaviour
based in academic work, and I wasn't at McGill and hadn't worked to get to
McGill, then these things wouldn't matter because I wouldn't be able to
relate to them; I'd have no point of reference. But I have a point of
reference, that, thankfully, is academia... and higher education at a
really respectable school."

Perhaps he is better than most after all, perhaps he understands his own
unique weaknesses and knows how to cope with them, or perhaps he's
regurgitating the same elitist hyperbole of any Ivy-League wannabe.

"I can temper [my habit]... but I can't maximize McGill at the cost of
giving this up. Neither can I maximize this, which would include me losing
my life," Syd continues, warming the mixture with a Bic lighter. "There's
two kinds of addicts. There's maintenance addicts, and then there's the
doomed. Maintenance addiction is something that is... in the long term,
really more devastating... They can accommodate the rest of the world and
social criteria and standards, go to McGill, and still do okay-[though not]
as well as they could. I don't do as well as I could because I'm not
willing to give up the sensuous element of indulgence." Neither hunger goes
entirely neglected; the syringe delivers its payload. A belligerent aura
grows about him.

"Defining McGill is not me, but [for] most McGill students, [the school] is
the necessary interaction between the prepped and naturally inclined future
elites, [as well as] an encounter with a sort of danger-taking risk in
hand, not losing themselves to it, and affirming the fact that their social
education to this point has functioned," Syd begins to rationalize. Most
other campus junkies, he explains, are "Ontarian rich kids... They have the
privilege... They have the most freedom, because their parents are the most
distracted, and they compensate by purchasing for their kids the love that
they can't provide."

Drugs are on all university campuses, and many make little effort at hiding
it, lining up at washrooms in frat house parties, and ducking behind
carrels in the library. These types, too, have to 'handle' it.

There are still some seasoned survivors at McGill.

"Especially at McGill, drugs are about community... McGill is such a
cliquey school," says Erin Vollick, English T.A., PhD student, and author
of the counter-culture novel, The Originals. "The people who fall off are
the people that have... gone into the darker side of Montreal that lives
here, as opposed to those just passing through in their designer jeans.
That's when they're in trouble."

A will-powered elitist psyche persists despite its own hypocrisy in the
drug-using community. "If you haven't rebelled fundamentally by [the age
of] 18 or 19 when you get to McGill, you're already into this social
stratification system where you're not going to rebel outside the bounds of
accepted rebellion," claims Syd. His elitist tendencies are getting the
better of him, and suddenly he's not much different from those Ontarian
rich kids he denigrates. This is the same 'ultimate justifying rationale'
that he warned about while still sober.

"You'll smoke some weed, might do some mushrooms, might drop a bit of E,
but you'll not meet [me] in a bar, come home to shoot up with [me], and end
up having a four person orgy... and then go back and be a sociology student
at McGill-not unless you have some other prior reference, or... you're
really, really atypical."

The effects of excessive drug use, according to Vollick are extremely
noticeable among undergrads, who are much more inclined to use than grad
students who would not be able to get away with it as easily.

"I've basically dealt with all of them... It's so easy to tell, it's just
apparent in their work... [which] suffers terribly.

"If [the smart ones] are not given the opportunity and if they don't feel
like expanding on their own work and setting themselves to their own tasks,
then of course [they will] create obstacles. If they're not getting what
they need to challenge them in the classroom, they're going to look for it
outside the classroom in one form or another," Vollick says. And they keep
looking too-in the library, in the bars, and anywhere else on campus.