Anonymous asked: I want to go to Reed by I'm not into drugs or alcohol. Would I still fit in?

plain-dealing-villain:

dandelionpie:

factsaboutreed:

Definitely.  Most students aren’t… that’s how they managed to become a Reedie in the first place.

Think of the drug use comments as an average.  About one third of students use enough substances to make  Hunter S. Thompson look like a lightweight, and the rest are mostly substance-free.  With them, averaged out Reed’s mean is that of Burning Man, but the median and mode are pretty clean.

Would other Reedies agree?

I hesitated to go to Reed because of what I’d heard about the drug culture, but I’m really glad I didn’t let it stop me. Nobody ever tried to pressure me into trying any substances during my time there, and there was enough non-drug-related stuff to do that I never felt left out. 

I’d say it’s more like it’s split three ways. There are the Heroic Dosers, the people who are sub-free, and the basically-normals. The middle third uses about as much drugs as any other liberal arts college, and less than most big schools. There is definitely a lot more diversity in the drugs taken; I would be very surprised if anywhere without a reputation does more 2C-*s and more obscure hallucinogens than Reed, and the whip-it, MDMA, LSD, mushrooms consumption is high. But there’s less alcohol, too.

I think distributions over individuals miss some of the picture.  When I first got to Reed as a freshman, I was kind of shocked by how central drugs seemed to the school’s culture, given that I had uniformly heard people say that the drug reputation was overblown.  Even if you don’t do drugs, you will almost certainly hear them talked about incessantly.  In other words, there are plenty of Reed students who don’t do drugs but there are fewer Reed social groups that don’t do drugs (or that don’t talk a lot about their drug use).

But largely I think this is just what college is like, except maybe at places like BYU.  At places with less drug use, there’s just more alcohol use instead, and that’s actually less healthy (and less interesting to hear about afterwards).  This is “the college experience” and if you’re social in college you will at least encounter it and great enthusiasm for it, whether or not you use substances yourself.

In short, not drinking or doing drugs may actually be alienating at some points at Reed, but I think that’d be true anywhere.  A lot of people want college to not only be a school or a shared living/social space but to be COLLEGE, this episode of mythic bacchanalian lost-boys frivolity in between living with their parents and “the real world.”   If you go to college, expect COLLEGE.