Inside This Issue…

By Nova Robinson

Published on Friday, February 3, 2006

Caffeine or alcohol? Where do Dartmouth students' drug allegiances lie? Those taupe and green DDS hot cups are ubiquitous on campus (especially before 10As). Are we collectively addicted to caffeinated beverages? Or do dumpsters full of those blue and silver cans provide a strong case that alcohol may be, in fact, our preferred drug?

I was kind of curious as to how much of that piping, brown liquid we down everyday before, during and after class. I figured that Food Court Larry would be the best person to ask. I trekked down the steps of Robo, up the stairs of Thayer and into Larry's lair. Larry wasn't there. I was told by the friendly person that swipes our cards find Rich Bibeau. He wasn't there either. Then I was told to go find the guy with the corner office. Like his fellow DDS employees, he was absent as well. So, sorry, I can't give you an exact figure. I'd guess we drink a lot of coffee.

After such intense research to figure out how much coffee we chug per day, I set off on the rather daunting task of figuring out how much alcohol is collectively consumed by us, the Dartmouth student body.

I gave up in about .2 second for several reasons: I had no real means of getting an accurate count of how much alcohol is consumed in every house and/or dorm on campus and, making up numbers is poor journalistic practice. Right? Also, I am not a math major and this search for truth sounded like a lot of math.

So alcohol wins by default?

I mean our coffee addiction is probably perpetuated by our consumption of alcohol. Or something like that.