U-MD. STUDENTS VOTE TO SOFTEN POT PENALTIES

University of Maryland students celebrated student government
election results yesterday with a bottle of bubbly -- nonalcoholic,
of course -- and a freshman broke into a mellow, Phish sort of victory dance.

Not only had they elected new student leaders, but nearly two-thirds
of the undergraduates who voted endorsed a referendum to reduce
penalties for students caught with marijuana so that they would be
treated the same as alcohol violations -- a result with much symbolic
weight but no actual power to change the school's policies.

"We are pumped," said senior and campaign activist Damien Nichols
yesterday afternoon, wearing a black suit and a "party organically"
T-shirt with a pot leaf. "The students have spoken!"

Not all the students -- not even 4,500 of the more than 25,000
undergraduates voted on the student government association election
ballot question.

The university's vice president for student affairs said the
administration takes any strong message from student elections very
seriously. But she doesn't think the school will be able to treat
drug and alcohol violations the same way.

"You've got to look at these two issues differently," Linda Clement
said, because marijuana can bring harder drugs, dealers and crime.
"Our campus police believe very strongly that drug activity attracts
people to the campus who are dangerous."

The vote comes just as the school, which has enjoyed a growing
national reputation for its academics in recent years, also is
fighting off the bad publicity that postgame student riots have
brought. Last week, drunken students celebrated the women's
basketball national championship win by setting fires and shaking
buses in College Park.

U-Md. is the fifth university in the country to pass a referendum
like this, part of a year-old campaign to promote marijuana as a
safer alternative to alcohol.

Steve Fox, executive director of Safer Alternative for Enjoyable
Recreation, cites statistics on all sorts of awful things that happen
to enormous numbers of college students as a result of drinking --
deaths, injuries, sexual assaults.

The SAFER campaign started at the University of Colorado and Colorado
State University after two students died after drinking. This year,
two other schools, the University of Texas and Florida State
University, passed similar referendums.

And none of those schools have changed their policies.

Gwendolyn Dungy, executive director of the National Association of
Student Personnel Administrators, laughed when she heard about the
vote. She doesn't know of any college in the country that treats drug
and alcohol violations the same -- mostly because of the law, she
said, because, unlike smoking marijuana, drinking is legal after 21.

Many on campus hadn't heard about the ballot question. Some were
shocked when they did. "I think it's absolutely ridiculous if you're
at college and you're smoking marijuana," freshman Dane Friedman said.

He thinks the referendum results could hurt the school's image and
the atmosphere on campus if students start thinking they can get away
with smoking up all the time.

College administrators across the country have been trying for
decades to find solutions to the sometimes ridiculous, sometimes
annoying, sometimes tragic problems that drinking and drugs bring to campus.

Smoke-ins at U-Md. in the 1970s gave way in the 1980s to a much
stricter policy, put in place after basketball star Len Bias died of
a cocaine overdose. That's when administrators set the rules in place
today, which John Zacker of the university's student misconduct
office said are more severe than at many other schools.

Students caught with drugs at U-Md. face a one-year suspension,
depending on the circumstances, and those who live in campus housing
almost always are forced to move out, he said.

The university does offer some alternatives, including education and
ongoing drug testing, rather than suspension, to give students with
minor offenses a chance to learn from mistakes.

Students are much less likely to get suspended or to lose housing for
alcohol violations, Zacker said. Those who do often have other
violations along with drinking.

The school, with about 35,000 students, has hundreds of liquor
violations every year and fewer than 100 drug violations, he said.

Nichols and Victor Pinho, a fellow advocate, are part of the
generation that grew up with the "war on drugs" and DARE classes. And
they see it as a moral issue.

"The average marijuana user does not have the impetus to stand on a
sofa and scream, 'Legalize marijuana!' " said Nichols, a government
and politics major from Bowie, who, like Pinho, has a job lined up
when he graduates this spring. "It's easier to live their life and do
their own thing."

Not him. This year he and Pinho, who head the U-Md. chapters of
Students for Sensible Drug Policy and the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws, "came together, blew it up, made it
public, gave it legs."

They spent the beginning of this week tooling around campus in a
decorated campaign golf cart to get out the vote, offering students
rides, hemp bracelets and propaganda.

Yesterday, Pinho said this is just the beginning.

"Next stop," he said, "the White House!"