Building a chemical dependency

Once upon a time the Army gave its soldiers cigarettes as part of their rations. Now cigarettes are bad, so the Army has switched to caffiene. Energy drinks at midnight chow, as much Pepsi and Coke as you can drink in the day. Coffee everywhere. The PX sells Red Bull, Starbucks Double Shots - if it contains caffiene it is on the market. Sleep is for the weak. There are only a few standing orders in our unit, one of them is that anyone going to midnight chow brings back extra Burn, which is some Coke product with Turkish labeling that is red in color and causes my muscles to spasm. It also makes me slightly irritable, so I avoid it unless under duress, or headed into a meeting that I know is going to be painfully long. Unfortunately that is most of them.

The biggest difference between college and now is that there was a recovery period built into caffiene/nicotine marathons. It was for a specified purpose for a finite period of time, like writing a 30 page paper the day/night before it was due - here caffiene is less a crutch and more a way of life. Don't think in 2035 I'm not going to be collecting some sort of VA disability for my destroyed attention span due to over-caffienation. I'm sure there will be support groups for us, all sitting together, constantly shaking our legs, staring a little too intently at a never-ending flow of PowerPoint slides.