Campus Hypocrisy:

MARIJUANA IS SAFER, BUT STUDENTS ARE PUSHED TO MORE DANGEROUS BOOZE

The Stats for Death and Injury Tied to Alcohol on Campus Are
Staggering, Yet Students Are More Harshly Punished for Pot -- Which
Is Far More Benign.

Two weeks ago, we published an excerpt from the recently released
Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? It was so
well received, we asked the authors for a second excerpt, which is
included below. If you have found one or both of these excerpts
compelling, we encourage you to participate in The Great Marijuana
Book Bomb http://www.marijuanabookbomb.com/ taking place today
(August 20). The authors have organized a one-day campaign to drive
the book to the top of the Amazon.com rankings. If you want to see it
reach #1, click on the book title above and make a purchase of your own.

Campuses are a microcosm of the broader society when it comes to
alcohol and marijuana use. Although both substances are illegal for
students under the age of twenty-one, the punishments for those who
use them are far from equal. Most universities impose policies
mandating that students who are busted using cannabis will face more
severe sanctions than students caught drinking alcohol. We are aware
of numerous students who have been removed from campus housing for
possessing a small amount of marijuana in their dorm room. Yet these
same students would have received a slap on the wrist -- most likely
in the form of a warning or campus probation -- if alcohol had been present.

Take Purdue University in Indiana, for example. This school imposes a
"zero tolerance" policy for students who are caught with marijuana in
their dorms. This means that the possession of any amount of cannabis
will result in immediate cancellation of their campus housing
contract. By contrast, Purdue employs a "three strikes" policy for
underage possession of alcohol. Bob Heitert, director of
administration for university residence halls at Purdue, justifies
the school's inconsistent policy this way: "Illegal drugs are against
the law for everyone, while alcohol is against the law for a larger
portion of students but not for everyone. Society seems to take a
different approach to alcohol than they do to illegal drugs. We
reflect that societal difference."

Universities like Purdue may be bound by a responsibility to punish
behavior that is not consistent with the law. But they are not
legally obligated to establish stringent penalties, such as enforcing
zero-tolerance housing policies or barring students with minor pot
violations from ever holding student office, as is the policy of the
University of Maryland at College Park. More importantly, they are
under no legal obligation to treat students who illegally possess
marijuana on campus more severely than they sanction students who
illegally possess alcohol. Yet most colleges do - and often for no
reason other than a perceived need to reflect existing societal
differences. And by maintaining these disparate punishments in the
face of student opposition, university governments and their boards
of trustees are making a conscious, if inadvertent, decision to steer
students toward the use of alcohol.

And what are the ramifications of these kinds of campus policies?
First, as we all know, the use of alcohol by college students is
rampant. According to data from the Harvard School of Public Health
College Alcohol Study, approximately 80 percent of college students
drink alcohol. Figures for binge drinking are even more startling.
For instance, more than 44 percent of students surveyed in 2001 said
that they had engaged in binge drinking in the preceding two weeks,
and more than 22 percent had done so at least three times in that
time period. Predictably, these frequent binge drinkers?and those
around them?often suffer as a result. As described by George Dowdall
in College Drinking, "[F]requent binge drinkers were 7 to 10 times
more likely than the nonbinge drinkers to get into trouble with the
campus police, damage property or get injured, not use protection
when having sex, or engage in unplanned sexual activity."

The social consequences of all this student drinking are even more
alarming. At the most tragic level, alcohol abuse is a leading cause
of fatalities on college campuses. In 2001, there were an estimated
1,700 alcohol-related unintentional-injury deaths among college
students and others aged 18 to 24. But these deaths are just the tip
of the alcohol-related-injury iceberg. Researchers estimate that
every year approximately 600,000 students between the ages of 18 and
24 are unintentionally injured while under the influence of alcohol.
Of course, those who drink are not the only ones adversely affected.
Even more disturbing is the number of injuries to others that are
caused by students under the influence of alcohol. Each year
approximately 700,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are
assaulted by students who have been drinking, and close to 100,000
students between the ages of 18 and 24 are victims of alcohol-related
sexual assault or date rape. Yet these raw numbers only tell part of
the story. The much broader impact of alcohol abuse on campus is
evident when one looks at the percentage of violent acts that are
booze-related. According to a 1994 report by the National Center on
Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), 95 percent of all campus
assaults are alcohol-related, and 90 percent of all reported campus
rapes involve a victim or an assailant who has been drinking alcohol.

"Virtually every sexual assault is associated with alcohol abuse.
Almost every assault of any kind is related to drinking." -
University of Maryland President C.D. "Dan" Mote, August 2008

University officials are well aware of these startling statistics. As
is evident by the quote above, campus leaders not only recognize that
alcohol is a frequent cause of injuries and assaults, but many also
believe that it is a factor in almost all campus assaults. Think
about this point for a moment. These same officials are aware that
students use marijuana on their campuses?most likely to a greater
extent than they would like. Yet despite pot's popularity among the
student body, you rarely if ever hear university officials or campus
police publicly blaming assaults or rapes on marijuana abuse. In
other words, the people responsible for maintaining safety on college
campuses recognize that alcohol use frequently leads to widespread
injuries and violent student behavior while marijuana use does not.
You would think that leaders of institutions of higher learning would
rationally and impartially examine this data and act accordingly. Think again.

Confronted with this nationwide college-drinking epidemic, university
leaders have generally concluded that the best approach to this
problem is to instruct students, including underage students, how to
consume booze more responsibly. In short, universities are
implicitly, and in some cases explicitly, endorsing alcohol as the
only acceptable recreational substance of choice for students.

Here is a prime example. In the introduction of our book we described
a prominent effort among university presidents to address the problem
of alcohol abuse and related violence on campuses. The more than 130
members of the "Amethyst Initiative" have publicly called for a
national debate on lowering the drinking age to eighteen years of
age. Proponents of such a change in the law believe it will bring
student drinking out into the open and will lead to more responsible behavior.

However one feels about the merits of this proposal, there is no
arguing that it is based on the assumption that college students are
going to drink alcohol one way or the other, and that the best
outcome our society can hope for is some kind of moderation of this
behavior. But we contend that this assessment is incomplete and pose
an alternative question. That is: If both alcohol and marijuana are
currently illegal for those under the age of twenty-one, why is it
acceptable to encourage young college students to "drink
responsibly," but not appropriate to suggest that they should "party
responsibly" with a less harmful substance like marijuana instead?

Don't we care enough about the health and safety of our nation's
college students to simply have this discussion?