STUDENTS ILLUSTRATED: REEFER FALSENESS

I know two sides to Jessica. One side can be summed up in her eyes.
They're a blazing green, and her eyes shift with the sharp accuracy of
her quick wit. She is articulate, funny, and intelligent. She excels
in the classroom and can be counted on for enlightening conversations.
As an impressionable freshman, I looked to her as a role model.

"Jessica - Version 2" I met months later, but she can be found
alongside me at self-op parties and underneath open Franzia taps. Her
energy livens up any social situation. However, later during freshman
year when I found out that she smoked pot, I was floored. Not that
partying with alcohol and partying with weed are worlds apart. But her
academic prowess and razor sharp humor jarred with my vision of the
slow-motion pothead burn-out.

I'm not the only person who has been overwhelmed by the seemingly
disparate characteristics of Jessica's personality. One fellow student
might know her as the "annoying" girl who sits in the front row asking
all of the questions. Another might know Jessica from keg stands and
smoke circles. When her two spheres collide, you get situations like
the following: In the company of one of her social compatriots,
Jessica raised a question in class regarding footnote 31. After the
lecture finished, she was met with the following comment, "You read
the footnotes. I didn't know you did class."

On campus, the stigma of pot smoking lingers in the air far heavier
than a recently exhaled joint. While alcohol is Stanford's accepted
drug of choice, flirting with Mary Jane often elicits offended outcries.

And while some would argue that smoking marijuana is less detrimental
to one's health than alcohol, subsets of Stanford's culture still
equate weed with degenerate motivation and morality. In addition to
the unjust assumptions of her poor academic performance due to herbal
recreation, Jessica recalls being at a 200-person graduation party
last year where she slunk around asking for a lighter to the
disapproval of upturned noses. A fellow Stanford student even asked
her how many people she'd slept with and then scoffed when the number
she reported was "too low" - because obviously if Jessica smoked pot,
her bed must be pretty active as well.

But I want to attack these stigmas, not from Jessica's perspective,
but, from the perspective of those upturned noses. I, too, used to
think that smoking weed was (for lack of a better word) bad.

Like many other students at Stanford, I came from a hometown where
getting ahead meant steering clear of drug and alcohol culture. The
partiers at my high school had slept with more people in our class
than they got points on history tests, and the kids who got high
during lunch were the same ones failing out of their Special Education
classes. There was no healthy medium. It was either upward bound and
dry or spiraling down into a pool of corruption and sin (to be a
little over-dramatic).

I arrived at college still carrying many presumptions about drugs and
the people who used them. My high school experience, media's images of
reclined junkies, and D.A.R.E.'s indoctrination had trained my mind to
think that drugs could never exist within the pristine upper echelon
of success known as Stanford University.

Then I met Jessica, the first of many other smokers I would meet while
at Stanford, who began to break down my pre-collegiate associations.
Still, the many repeated reactions like Jessica's presumptuous
classmate show that many others on campus have yet to realize that
recreational drugs and ambition can happily coexist.

I blame the divide between social and academic spheres for the
perpetuation of Stanford's ganjaphobia. Theories and ideas are
exchanged in classes, not blunts. And benzene rings rarely make a
debut around the Maypole at Synergy. Doing so would break the culture
of each respective environment. However, the individuals who exist in
both spheres are the same person: The girl asking annoying questions
in class is also the girl making a gravity bong out of a discarded
lemon juice bottle. And while bringing up that bowl you smoked last
night in front of a Nobel Prize winner might seem inappropriate, it is
exactly this act that would lead towards a more realistic and
embracing culture.

The stigmatization of pot - shaped by high school flunkies, D.A.R.E.,
and Lifetime after-school specials - doesn't apply to the diverse
student body we take for granted at Stanford. While burn-outs still
exist on the other side of Palm Drive, finding them on campus proves a
challenge. Correlations go up in smoke when your sample population
represents an elite one-percent of humanity. So, to Jessica's
classmates, I encourage you to question the conclusions you make about
Jessica the next time you see her light up, because chances are,
you're wrong.

Laura would be honored if you rolled a joint with this column.