Programming In K

By Christian Hummel and Alexander Wilson | Wednesday, October 21, 1998

Ketamine is nominally manufactured as a tranquilizer for subhuman primates. It comes in vials, in liquid form, and can either be injected intra-muscularly or 'cooked,' which crystallizes it and allows the user to cut it up and snort it like cocaine. Mild doses gives a high which leaves the user mentally lucid but physically intoxicated — he feels a slight high but looks drunk. Higher doses leave users in a 'K-Hole,' basically physically immobile. The exterior world seems syrupy and discontinuous. Both the Ketamine high and the K-hole lasts about an hour.

Ecstasy is a party drug, a club drug. It is generally manufactured in Europe, and comes to America as an off-white pill. It takes between half an hour and an hour to take effect, and the resultant high lasts about two hours. It is an upper, with distortive effects — sounds are particularly distorted (hence its popularity as a club drug).

Acid and marijuana and cocaine you know about.

The psychological effects of these drugs, the class of people they generally appeal to, and the use to which they are generally put mark them as very different drugs, with very different scenes and very different association.

They are grouped together here because each of these drugs is being used — and used in surprising amounts — by students at the world's best tech school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

In September of 1997, Scott Krueger, an MIT freshman from near Buffalo, New York, passed out from drinking one night during his pledge period. His brothers tried to wake him, and when they couldn't, they called an ambulance. Krueger was beyond help at that point; the next morning he died.

Scott Krueger's death followed a series of drinking incidents at MIT, the most notorious of which was the three-story fall down an elevator shaft by the President of Lambda Chi Alpha, a popular national house. These events had already, before Krueger's death, turned the faculty and administration squarely against the fraternity system.

Scott Krueger's death received a lot of national attention (MIT was perhaps lucky that it didn't receive more; it occurred near the time when several other college deaths around the country were attributed to fraternity binge drinking) and it became clear that the authorities would have to do something.

So the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stepped down from its ivory tower and mandated that for one year (the 1997-1998 school year) all affiliated fraternities would be dry. MIT also implemented a series of rigorous investigative programs to ensure that all fraternities were compliant. The school, concurrently, placed strenuous restrictions on the fraternities in general.

The local authorities went so far as to put municipal cops in liquor shops, making it very difficult for (largely underage) students to buy alcohol. 'Even with a good fake ID, it's impossible to get alcohol anywhere in Cambridge,' said one Harvard junior. 'Everybody's cracking down.'

There existed, before Krueger's death, a substantial drug underground at MIT. Ecstasy, ketamine, acid and marijuana all were known on the campus. Still, alcohol dominated the social scene.

'My first fall at MIT [one year before Krueger's death] I was surprised by how much alcohol was available,' said one junior male. 'Every night in every house, someone was drinking.' A senior male agreed. 'Before Krueger's death, MIT was the biggest party school in Boston.'

Traditional stereotypes of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology hold it to be the nerdiest school in America, full of funless anti-social introverts to whom the existence of other souls is little more than a mathematical probability.

There is, of course, some truth to this, but the fraternities of MIT fill a hefty social role, brothers there say again and again. The reason has a lot to do with geography.

Harvard is, really, a party-free school and Wellesley, nearby, does not have (for obvious reasons) a vibrant co-ed party scene. The fraternity system at MIT is therefore the only local entity institutionally equipped to handle the hordes of weekend partyers from Harvard, Wellesley, the nearby Simmons College for Women, and, of course, MIT itself. 'There are a lot of people at MIT that are pretty much uninvolved in the social scene,' said one senior, a brother at a national fraternity. 'But for the rest of the people, the fraternities pretty much dominate the social scene.

With alcohol, the staple of MIT parties, suddenly unavailable, MIT students needed to look to other sources. One alternative was immediately apparent: drugs.

MIT students were quick to point out that the drug culture is still a comparatively minor feature of the MIT social scene, and, of course, an even smaller part of the day-to-day lives of all MIT students, given the amount of those who choose to remove themselves from social interaction altogether.

Still, there is a substantial drug culture at MIT, and it has increased, since the administration there banned social alcohol consumption, not only in terms of the amount of men and women who use drugs but also in terms of the range of drugs they choose.

'My freshman year at MIT, the only drug I ever saw was pot,' said one MIT junior. 'Now, I know people who use not only pot but also cocaine, ketamine, ecstasy, and acid on a regular basis.'

Noted another MIT junior: 'Let me put it this way. We're 2000 feet from Boston. You can get anything you want.'

The frequency of use has also increased. 'Of course drug use went up [with the sanctions prompted by Krueger's death],' said another junior male. 'There was no alcohol. What else were people going to do?'

The amount of people doing drugs has also increased. 'I haven't seen many hard drugs here,' said one sophomore, 'but I know that a lot more people I knew smoked pot when the alcohol ban was still in effect.' Added a junior, 'Nobody cards you for a dime bag.'

The drug culture at MIT, then, existed before Scott Krueger's death but was brought out by the sanctions that stemmed from it.

Can similar developments occur at Dartmouth?

The same factors certainly seem to exist. There is already a drug culture here, and it is not entirely underground.

When Alex Wilson contacted one male '00 in the course of his research on the cocaine scene at Dartmouth (see facing page), he was told, 'I don't know of anyone who does cocaine, and I hadn't even heard many rumors, but I'm not surprised. So many of my friends who came to College never having done anything other than smoke pot or even that at all, have, since I've been here, branched out into more stigmatized drugs, like acid and opium and mushrooms [another popular hallucinogen] that I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of them came home and told me he had done coke. There's already a pretty big acid and pot scene here, so I guess that's where a lot of the coke scene naturally comes from.' Several other students contacted for that article also noted widespread experimentation with hard drugs other than cocaine.

The administration's attitude on alcohol during the last decade can hardly be described as friendly, and there is no reason to think that policies will change under James Wright (who formulated many of the anti-alcohol policies during the Freedman years).

The MIT drug scene is noteworthy to Dartmouth not only for its investigative value but also because it provides a warning against emasculating the alcohol orientation of the fraternity scene.

As MIT proved, reducing student abuse simply isn't that simple.

Programming In K

Article Tools

Related Articles