Tonite We're Gonna Party Like It's 1985

by Alexander Wilson

The eighties are back.

In some ways, at least. The resurgence is not limited to flashy cars, flashy clothes, and dubious taste. Cocaine is also back, with a vengeance.

Cocaine prices have fallen through the floor in the last two decades. A gram of cocaine, which in the eighties cost up to $80, now goes for half that. In fact, a gram of cocaine is, these days, sometimes less expensive than an eighth of an ounce of marijuana. And many college kids have been snapping it up like North Face fleeces.

Cocaine scenes at many colleges are raging out of control. At Columbia, which is three blocks from a notorious drug-dealing neighborhood, cocaine is as common, if not more so, than marijuana. Some New York University students mix traces of cocaine in with nasal decongestants for a discreet pick me up during class.

While cocaine is probably not as widespread here as it is at a metropolitan university, Dartmouth is certainly not immune.

To speak of a “cocaine scene” at Dartmouth is accurate in some ways, and misleading in others. There is a fairly substantial group of people (estimates I gathered from users ranged from 50 to 150) who use the drug with some degree of regularity, more than once a month. These same students roughly doubled their estimates when asked how many students had used cocaine at least once in the last year.

The nature of the cocaine scene helps explain the disparate responses.

For all their numbers, there isn't a lot of social cohesion to the people who use cocaine at Dartmouth. They aren't just in one particular social circle , nor are they all friends with each other. Rather, the group spans ethnic, socioeconomic, Greek and other traditional social boundaries.

Most of the cocaine on campus is distributed by students who go down to New York or Boston and return with enough to sell. There is no substantial local cocaine scene, and no big dealers. It's a variety of people who distribute to their friends. The drug, which has a street value of about $40 per gram, doubles to nearly $80 a gram on campus.

There are some events on campus which apparently lead to elevated levels of use. For example, there was an influx of the drug during Homecoming weekend. “There was definitely a lot it floating around,” a male `00 said. Though he said that he had been away in the spring, he had heard that “it was a lot bigger then than it is now.”

Cocaine use also becomes more widespread during finals. “I rarely use cocaine for social reasons,” this student continued. “I use it when I have a final the next day and haven't done any work all term. One time, I wrote an eight page paper in an hour and half,” said the `99 male.

A female '00 told a different story. “My sophomore summer, I was studying for a final at the last minute. I did some blow and I was racing through the pages and memorizing everything — for about three minutes. Then I got too jittery. I paced up and down my room for about two hours. When I finally forced myself back down at the computer I was panicking, and I started feeling nauseous. I started feeling really depressed, and thought for a while I was about to have a heart attack. Needless to say, I did poorly on the midterm.”

The cocaine users I spoke to gave fairly standard descriptions of the cocaine high. One '99 woman summed it up well. “You start babbling on and on,” she said. “You get really garrulous, and talk about stupid, vacuous things. You also start telling people intimate details of your life that you wouldn't tell otherwise.” So is the effect similar to being drunk? “It's completely different. When you're on coke, you become incredibly confident and you just want to talk all the time. You want to tell people things about yourself.”

“You're incredibly alert,” an '01 man added. “You don't go to sleep until the next morning, and even then, you sleep horribly. It's like you've had twenty cups of coffee. You're more awake than you could ever imagine.”

Perhaps what cocaine is famous for, though, is weight loss. “When I'm on blow, I couldn't eat if you paid me. Food is the absolute furthest thing from my mind. So far from being hungry, I feel like I never want to eat again,” the female '00 said. I was told numerous stories about weight loss through cocaine.

“Absolutely,” he responded. “The problem with cocaine is that it's good, but not that good. That's to say, the first time you do it, you think, `Wow, this is fun, but not that much fun, so I could stop whenever I want!' I definitely try not to do it too regularly.”

An occasional user told me, “I used to do quite a bit of cocaine, and now I have to be careful. I don't want to get back into that routine. But if someone's doing cocaine in a room, I have to leave, because I want to do it too badly.” Many students said that they only use cocaine when it's around them. From all reports, it's a very difficult drug to turn down.

However, the crash can outweigh the benefits. I spoke to one student who has stopped doing the drug entirely. “It was getting worse and worse every time I did it. The next day would be a total washout for me. I'd sleep horrendously, be exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated, and just feel terrible. I had to stop doing it, because it just wasn't worth the fun.”

“It makes a bad hangover look like a walk in the park,” said another student. Many students, in fact, take prescription drugs such as Valium or Percocet after a night of bingeing in order to help them crash better.

One '99 male spoke at length about withdrawal, “You'll be sitting down eating dinner or something really normal and all of the sudden you get this sinking depression that comes out of nowhere. Even when you're not on it, your emotions tend to swing a lot higher and lower. Even after a couple of weeks you still get the fluctuation.”

What marked the responses of the cocaine users I spoke to more than anything, though, was an enthusiasm for the drug so strong it can only be characterized as addiction.

No one I talked to, even those who had only used the drug once or twice in there life, could claim they felt no urging. There were clear signs of physical dependence in their reverent descriptions of the high, in their craving (its difficult to find another word for it) for the drug, and, generally, in the larger-than-life terms they used to describe it.

Heroin chic did cocaine a big favor. The early nineties made cocaine seem almost a soft-core phenomenon. In fact, many of the cocaine users I talked to were adamant in their insistence that they would never use heroin — that, they thought, was the mark of a real addict.

But they are just kidding themselves. In their faces and in their words I understood it — I couldn't find a single disinterested, occasional coke user, at least at Dartmouth.

But it doesn't seem like they realize it. There is this pervasive, panicky insistence that cocaine isn't as bad as people think, this consistent denial of the evident facts of addiction which just makes the cocaine scene seem stupid.

As far as its users are concerned, though, the cocaine scene is here to stay, and so stay it will.

They are addicts, and if you talk to enough of them, you can see it in their eyes and hear it in their words: the cocaine scene, vibrant now, seems headed for danger.