Philosophers Stoned: A Brief History of Narcotics on Campus

As a young student, well-known misrerabilist and occasional novelist Franz Kafka wrote that “my peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have.” He didn't get invited to all that many parties, I imagine. But the quote highlights the lasting nexus between drugs and hedonism and 'the student lifestyle'. From every grotty flat adorned with Bob Marley posters and that awful rainbow-coloured marijuana sign, to every episode of Skins and every conversation I've ever had with truculent taxi-drivers about lazy student bastards smoking joints and spending the hardworking taxpayers' money on hemp vests and Topman boxers, the connection between being a student and taking drugs is steadily reinforced. 

There are practical aspects to this connection: being a student generally means having more free time, more parties to go to, a wee bit of disposable income and a general lack of responsibility or work ethic. There's an element of transgression too; like eating spaghetti hoops straight from the tin or sleeping until two in the afternoon, taking drugs is something your saintly mother would probably not approve of. Finally, it's important to remember that a great deal of this chat is based on hoary clichés perpetuated by nonsense like Skins. Plenty of students are living more like Cliff Richard than Keith Richards, because drugs are expensive (allegedly) and increasingly the universal truth of student life is that you'll spend most of it being totally skint.

Nevertheless, there's no doubt that drugs and being a student are comprehensively entwined in the popular imagination, and this has historical precedent. There's the raucous boozing of students in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when scholars of Trinity College Dublin rattling through the city's taverns earned a reputation for violence and debauchery. If you've been to Temple Bar recently you'll have an idea of what this entailed. Then there's Kerouac and Ginsberg and all that crowd ostensibly attending various Ivy League schools in the States whilst cultivating a taste for jazz and a broad selection of uppers and downers.

But the most powerful cultural imprint of the link between students and drugs is the 1960s counter-culture movement in both the United States and the UK. For all its heterogeneity and its variety of aims and ideals, and for all the reams of academia written about it, the obvious image it brings to mind is students with long hair getting all kinds of high. Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Hendrix, the Grateful Dead – throughout the eight or so years when the counter-culture was at its peak, one of the clear threads running through its different aspects was the use of drugs. The pronouncements of commentators at the time mirror much of the moral panic about drug use today. Joan Didion worried about children, barely teenagers, wasting their formative years in a careless, aimless narcotic haze. Even Leary, the great evangelist of psychedelic drugs as a tool for expanding consciousness, was shocked at what he had started.

He argued that “acid is not for every brain... Only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain.” Again, I don't know if he got invited to all that many parties, but the way hard drug use turned counter-cultural optimism into a parody of itself suggests he might have had a point.

The vim and political activism of the counter-culture have largely faded, but getting high remains an almost inescapable facet of the university experience. If you go through three or four years of college or university without coming across drugs in some form you're probably studying too hard. What's important is to separate the insidious cultural memories of the Beat Generation and acid house and Hunter S. Thompson, the hagiography of soft middle-class rebellion, from the reality, the facts and the dangers.