A L S O_ T O D A Y

Camille on Campus
By Camille Paglia
Warning! Mentorship land mine ahead!

T A B L E_ T A L K

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R E C E N T L Y

The Big Lie
By Michael O'Donovan-Anderson
Why have today's students become a bunch of grade-grubbing morons?
(01/25/99)

Ditching school
By Eli Lehrer
Why would Marc Weiss, a tenure-track professor at Columbia University, give it all up to coordinate tour bus parking?
(01/22/99)

Justifying J-school
By Orville Schell
The dean of UC-Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism responds to a recent article critical of institutions like (and including) his
(01/22/99)

In the letters of my name
By Isaac Zaur
Seduced by bad romantic verse, an editor of a college literary journal sets out to find his poetic stalker
(01/20/99)

Darwinian admissions
By Megan Olden
Are selective universities turning a blind eye to some students in need?
(01/18/99)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
ARCHIVE

Saturday night f_e_^v__e_R
STOMACH FLU, A BATCH OF POT BROWNIES
AND THE '60s DRUG MYTH: WHY ONE WOMAN
CAN'T SEEM TO TAKE ANY OF IT SERIOUSLY.

The man at the Poison Control Center sounded amused. I had just finished describing to him my roommate's symptoms: shortness of breath, dilated pupils, waves of heat rushing over her body and -- oh yes -- she had eaten some funny brownies that night.

"Take her to the hospital," he told me laconically. "Call an ambulance."

"Well, thank you very much as if I didn't know," I wanted to spit. "Next time I ingest some mercury, I'll call you up so that you can tell me what the number for 911 is."

I had gone to bed early that Saturday night, feeling like I had the flu. My roommate was out. She is always out. She is an exchange student from Germany, tall and coltish. Except for a couple of missing bicuspids, she looks like a model.

But at about 12:30, she came back and woke me, obviously agitated. She said in that lovely Anglo-German accent that someone had given her "a cake," she found out there might be drugs in it and now her thoughts seemed to be floating "out of her head." If something happened to her in the night, such as, for instance, death, she wanted me to know.

My poor roommate is not exactly a hard-living gal. A tiny finger of Amaretto administered by one of my friends the other week flushed her up to her forehead, and just watching the drug consumption in "Trainspotting" made her turn three shades of green. Still, I thought, a marijuana-laced brownie would hardly kill her. She was a strong, big girl and, hell, this was college culture in the 1990s. We belonged to a generation fed on the glorious stories of drugs.

Our parents were, after all, the baby boomers. Since childhood, we have been witness to the industries that have sprung up around the nostalgia for their indulgences. Our after-school activity consisted of watching the thinly veiled, grooving ghost tales on "Scooby-Doo." We have consumed a media diet of Woodstock, Dylan and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" with a full knowledge of all their implications. This generation has inhaled one of the biggest inside jokes in North American society: We understand that drug use is condoned as long as you keep it light and entertaining, as long as you can wring a good story out of it.

With this mind-set, it was easy to be cavalier about my roommate's symptoms. As a precaution, I did ask the poor girl a few leading questions, in case someone had slipped her something stronger than plain old pot, just in case I would have to hide all the sharp instruments and tie her down. Could she, I asked, see anything, ah, unusual in the room? Were the walls melting or perhaps speaking to her in Urdu?

At the time, she seemed fretful but fine -- no hallucinations, no visions, no talk of God or the sublime. I sent her off to bed shaking my head, telling myself to give her a crash course on American recreational pharmaceuticals the next morning. It seemed odd that she did not know about the space cake. I had always thought of it as being a global phenomenon, but then again, I am Canadian. For me, cross-cultural experience means accepting the Anaheim Mighty Ducks as a legitimate hockey team.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. A change for the worse

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