PUT THE DRUG BUST IN PERSPECTIVE

A look into all things "Operation: Ivy League."

Operation Ivy League is over. The dangerous element is removed from
campus, and we can spend these last few work-filled, sleepless nights
at ease, free from the menace of illegal drugs.

Like many of my peers, I've spent the past week obsessively reading
articles about the bust. And after reading countless Spectrum updates
and snarky Gawker posts, I realized that this grand Columbia scandal
was perhaps not so grand at all.

Let's first consider the amount of drugs bought by undercover officers
from the "Columbia Five" (a name I'll address later). We keep hearing
that $11,000 worth of narcotics were procured from the students over a
five-month period. But a less-reported fact is that $5,000 of that
money changed hands in a deal for 1.5 pounds of marijuana on Nov. 23
(two weeks before the bust).

Would Chris Coles have ever sold $5,000 worth of marijuana to someone
who was not a "youthful undercover officer who posed as a drug
middleman for another college outside the city"? Probably not. No
Columbia student is going to purchase marijuana by the pound. It took
someone (the aforementioned police officer) offering to buy that kind
of quantity--someone who supposedly wanted to deal at another
school--for such an exchange to go down. And if we ignore that one
transaction, we can see that this was not the immense criminal
enterprise of the Post's dreams. These were five college kids selling
drugs to their friends, frat brothers, and fellow partygoers.

One has to wonder, then, just how we came to conceive of this past
Tuesday's events as the bust to end all busts. One obvious answer is
that nothing this exciting has happened on campus in awhile. But that
doesn't exactly explain the national attention garnered by the
arrests. To that end, we might blame the New York Police Department's
perhaps excessive show of muscle--the use of battering rams and riot
vans sounds a little bit like overkill in the name of taking down a
couple of sleeping 20-year-olds. And was it strictly necessary, or
just funny, for police to call the investigation "Operation Ivy
League" or to allegedly put a Columbia sweatshirt on Perez when what
he asked for was a winter coat?

All of the above naturally fed the dog in heat that is the so-called
media. Blogs and papers alike jumped on the title "Operation Ivy
League" until an embarrassed Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly
disavowed the name and (incorrectly) blamed it on the press. The
Village Voice's blog went so far as assign boy-band-esque titles to
each of the involved students ("The OG," "The Prettyboy," etc.). A few
outlets, as previously mentioned, dubbed the dealers the "Columbia
Five," which--even if done ironically to mock the relatively minimal
historical importance of the students as compared to groups like the
Little Rock Nine and Chicago Seven--was still in poor taste.

That said, I want to make clear that I don't believe the actions of
our fellow students are excusable or that they deserve to be cleared
of all charges. These were smart kids who knew exactly what they were
doing and should therefore bear the consequences of their poor
decisions. But I do want to put their decisions, and the spectacle
that followed, in perspective. The fact is, college kids will always
do drugs, and as long as that's true, college kids will also sell
drugs. Generally speaking, it's a good time to get that kind of
experimentation out of the way.

Furthermore, part of what makes us so susceptible to trying things
like narcotics is that, as 20-year-olds, we hold a general belief in
our own invincibility. It's a belief that was probably also at the
root of the five Columbia students' own impressions that they wouldn't
get caught.

But they did get caught, so the question becomes, "Where do we go from
here?" The coming months will be unhappy ones in which we will watch
our former classmates go through the justice system, and, whether
they're found guilty or not, have their lives changed forever.
Regardless of our respective opinions on New York State drug law, or
how we feel about the supposed (and I would argue, unwarranted) damage
to Columbia's reputation that may result from Tuesday's arrests, we
would do well to remember that Chris Coles, Harrison David, Adam
Klein, Stephan Vincenzo, and Mike Wymbs are not hardened criminals,
but friends and classmates. More importantly, they're kids. Did they
do something stupid and harmful? Absolutely. But let's step back for a
moment and stave off the urge to turn this whole situation--these kids
and their actions--into something it never was.