dragonbook

6 Now what was this brilliant young man doing in a mental institution? Kathy found out later that Steve had been experimenting with LSD--and that it had basically fried his brain. A sad waste. So--don't end up like Steve. Resist the temptation to use drugs. Now for most of you, that one is pretty easy. The more serious temptation, at least on this campus, is alcohol. And my number two bit of advice to you is this: avoid alcohol. Once again, I'm sure all of you know how alcohol can mess up your school career and your life, but I'll give you a couple of concrete examples involving Northern students. Winter, 1989. Cold around here, as always during the winter. One young student got drunk at a party, and tried to find his way home. He got so confused he wandered into someone's backyard and couldn't find his way out. They found his frozen body the next morning. A few years later, four Northern students, three young men and a young woman, were drinking together. The campus community never got the full story of what happened, but the three young men were all charged with rape. One of them ended up committing suicide. One drinking party: four ruined lives. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. One semester a student group put up outside the bookstore a thing called "the wall." Students were asked to add to the wall their own comments about the ways in which alcohol had affected their lives. It was really depressing to read--lots of real tear-jerkers. A typical example: A young woman wrote that she had gotten drunk at a party. A guy gave her a ride home, and she ended up sleeping with him. The problem was she had a steady boyfriend, who she said she loved. And she wrote "on the wall" that now there was this "dirty secret" between her and her boyfriend, and it was just eating away at their relationship.