Saturday Night Conscious

Beer is probably my least favorite thing to drink, next to cough syrup. Some wines and cocktails taste slightly better, but rarely would I pick them over juice or soda ... or water. I've been told, and I've told myself, that at parties I ought to hide this preference and at least hold something alcoholic to avoid making everyone, myself included, uncomfortable. I don't honestly understand why I should, though. My abstinence is a personal decision, not one I try to impose on others. I've seen and heard about too much drinking-related destruction to consider acquiring a thirst fdr alcohol worthwhile.

It doesn't follow from this that I've never felt an urge to imbibe more than moderately. From time to time I've thought of temporarily expunging problems and disappointments with a bottle. The reason I haven't has a lot to do with my suspicion that I might enjoy it a little too much and come to crave it. I myself shrink from the idea of losing control over what I do and say, and I don't understand alcohol abuse. The extremist mentalities sometimes manifest at Dartmouth truly confound me.

I can't comprehend the pleasure in purposefully drinking oneself into a state of physical sickness; or the view that social functions want some vital ingredient unless alcohol abounds; or why boasts about consuming an inordinate volume of liquor should gain peer respect; or how chugging contests are a gratifying pastime. Granting that my perspective on drinking may place me near one end of the Dartmouth spectrum, at the other a preoccupation with alcohol supplants healthy social interaction.

Four years at the College have yet to convince me, however, that Dartmouth deserves a reputation for heavy drinking and raucous behavior more than many other colleges and universities. The workhard-party-hard syndrome is not peculiar to "Hangover, New Hampshire," though bumper stickers and recent press coverage might lead us to think otherwise. To any who allege that students here drink excessively because they lack city diversions, I reply that contemporaries at city schools drink excessively because they lack a respite from city diversions. On the Row or in local bars, it matters not: students elsewhere may drink less noticeably, but not less. Dartmouth does have a drinking problem, not an unusual one but definitely a longstanding one, as experiences recalled by alumni can attest. Today, the situation is under scrutiny.

What does this scrutiny find? A college where fraternities with free and free-flowing beer dominate the social scene; where dorm residents paid $7,500 for punchedin windows and other damages last year; and where some freshmen need help up the stairs even on weeknights and others feel alienated for declining to drink. The author of The New York Times Selective Guide toColleges 1982—83 summed it up: "No other school attracts students with the stamina to drink themselves into oblivion one day and partake in some of the best liberal arts schooling offered anywhere in the nation the next."

Close scrutiny also discovers, however, senior fraternity brothers who express disdain for this situation, scorning the emptiness of Baker Library on the Sunday night of Winter Carnival and blaming it on hangovers. An alcohol peer counseling program, the immediate success of Eleazar's Dungeon (a dry nightclub), and the marked student turnout in January at a three-day conference on alcohol at Dartmouth all exemplify another attitude, a

progressive one, among students. Since the appeal of recovering alcoholic Norman Carpenter '53 in the May 1976 issue of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, the College, too, has demonstrated its awareness of the alcohol problem - via the establishment of the Alcohol Concerns Committee, the issuance of an alcohol policy statement officially condemning alcohol abuse and abrogating its place in the Dartmouth tradition, and, most visibly, in the staging of the January conference. The time has come for more individuals to follow these leads and take personal action vis-a-vis alcohol concerns.

Responsibility for the persistence of a drinking tradition at Dartmouth lies not just with the drinkers. As Steve d'Antonio 'B2 noted last term in The Dartmouth, those who reinforce alcohol abuse by laughing at it, those who recognize the dangers yet remain silent, and those who never try to

alleviate the. social pressure to drink heavily "deny the next generation of Dartmouth students an alternative role model to the frat basement hero." Beer by the kegful should not be offhandedly treated as a harmless thirst-quencher; the College's isolation should not be allowed to minimize the ruinous potential of heavy drinking for the drinkers, for their families, for their careers, and for the victims of their drunken driving. We must start eliminating alcohol use as a means of identification with the far-flung Dartmouth community and its history.

Not until last year did I feel confident in defending my option not to drink without apology. Perhaps this merely reflects a lessening of my susceptibility to social pressures, but I think the stigma attached to nondrinking at Dartmouth has begun to fade. Attitudes toward drinking are far from homogeneous here, and over time I've witnessed radical changes in those of certain friends. That these attitudes are so malleable during undergraduate years underscores the importance of what happens tO the social climate at the College. Talk won't be transformed into action this Saturday night - but maybe the next. Or the one after that?