Here’s a fabulous post by Dartmouth College student Owen Jennings who, just prior to entering college suffered liver failure, for no clear reason. This meant that he entered college with a really, really good reason to avoid the all too common campus poison, alcohol. He even pledged a fraternity, and yet, “not even a sip.”

Some highlights:

Even though no one cares that I don’t drink, they still see it as bizarre. But being alcohol-free has given me a unique vantage point from which to observe college life and culture. It seems to me that alcohol might be the only drug that everyone is expected to use.

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At Dartmouth, and at every other college campus I have been to, the consumption of alcoholic beverages is common. But the word “consumption” is an understatement. I’m not talking about the casual sipping of a few beers. Here, alcohol consumption means the rapid and repeated gulping and guzzling of beer after beer after beer. Often, students will drink upwards of 15 or 20 beers. On any given night, a frat brother or a sorority sister will spend hours vomiting. Sometimes a classmate will wind up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. And often, these people wake up unable to remember anything that happened the night before.

My sobriety has shown me how mindless my friends’ drinking has become. The question shouldn’t be, “Why aren’t you drunk?” Rather, we need to start asking, “Why are you drunk?”

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I realize that drinking is a way to rebel and revel in the newfound freedom that college brings. But it’s also a veil, a way to manipulate, distort and enhance who we really are. If anything, being sober at the Animal House has taught me just to be myself.