COLUMN: Learning, too late for some

From Ariel Horn's, "Candy from a stranger," Fall '00 From Ariel Horn's, "Candy from a stranger," Fall '00If you were anything like me when you were in the fifth grade, learning about drugs was a day in the park. As fifth-graders with about as much knowledge of drugs as what was written on the side of the Children's Tylenol bottle, drug education was little more than an easy-breezy day to watch no-brainer PBS specials in which "Cracked-Out Carrie" and "Doped Debbie" learn about the dangers of inhaling model glue. Sometimes "Heroin Harry" and "Smack Sally" showed up, too. In addition, the high school peer leadership program came to show us pictures of blackened lungs from tobacco, to talk to us about how doing drugs was bad, to perform skits for us about how to react in a pressured situation. Heads filled with such witty retorts as, "I'm not a chicken, you're a turkey," we all happily scurried home from school completely positive that we would never ever do drugs. And then, somewhere between fifth grade and college, our thinking grew clouded. The commercials grew quieter, and our desires to try new things and be reckless in our youth increased tenfold. A week ago at Trinity College, before the school's spring break, four college roommates fell unconscious as a result of combining prescription drugs, such as Xanax, Valium, migraine medicine and sleeping pills. Fortunately, three of the students recovered consciousness and are now doing fine, though they are being charged with drug possession and driving under the influence. Tragically, though, only three of the four roommates will return to classes when Trinity's spring break ends. The last room in their apartment will remain empty and silent -- the last roommate, Josh Doroff, died of a drug overdose. According to a New York Times interview with a family friend of the deceased, the student was "polite," "athletic," "intelligent" and "a man who did not, as far as anyone knew, dabble in drugs." Let's face it -- the student who passed away wasn't that different from the rest of us. Most likely, he was enjoying his college experience, hanging out with friends and doing what he thought were a couple of harmless drugs and drinking a little. Like millions of college students across the nation, he was "just having fun." For many of us, drugs are irrelevant in fifth grade. College, rather than the fifth-grade classroom, is home for many people who have decided to experiment with drugs. Rather than gasping at this realization, we've grown to simply accept that this experimentation is as typical of college life as taking your first midterm. Just as the caution, fear and anxiety that couple first midterms fade as students take more exams, so too does the cautious, careful questioning behavior of students trying drugs for the first timeEturn into carelessness and the "it could never happen to me" belief. However, maintaining that cautious behavior of the first-time trial is the only way to prevent tragedies such as the one at Trinity from occurring again. The question remains: How do we re-teach college students lessons they forgot, or chose to forget, in fifth-grade drug education within the confines of realistically understanding that college students, for the most part, won't always "just say no?" Programs have been created at universities to make students aware of the dangers of alcohol and drug use. Penn has devised extensive programming to educate students and to provide alternatives to drugs and alcohol. At Trinity College, administrators have sent out urgent e-mails, voicemail messages and letters to all in their college community about the recent tragedy. Trinity has even gone so far as to literally knock on the doors of every single room on campus to see if there were students inside and to see if they were doing OK. University authorities have done everything that they have in their power to do; they have made rules, enforced rules, provided otherEsocial options and educated their communities about the effects of drugs and alcohol. The problem is that it's just not enough. Sadly, these tragic life lessons about drug and alcohol overdoses cannot be taught in a fifth-grade classroom. They cannot be taught through buttons, on T-shirts, at after-school bake sales or in commercials. It can only be taught in seeing the tragedies of others. While the fifth-grade drug-free battle cry "be smart, don't start!" may no longer apply, it's still not too late to be smart.