JUST SAY 'NO' TO FACULTY DRUG TESTS

Drugs and academia are like milk and cookies. Drugs have always fueled
abstract thought, and they always will. When we limit drug use amongst
our staff and professors, we are also denying them access to a medium
that allows them to think "differently" and make novel connections. We
students then don't get the full-bore blast of creative culture
jamming which we all know is possible, and for which so many of us
came to college in the first place.

In a vo-tech or trade school, drug tests would make sense. Maybe
having a stoner teach arc-welding (or, anyway, teaching arc-welding
while stoned) is a bad idea, I grant you. A PCP-charged
air-conditioning repair person may not be real, what, efficient.

But I actually kind of want my mathematics professors to be rolling
hard in their spare time, and a few coked-to-the-gills computer
scientists might not be a bad thing either. If you haven't
hallucinated your way through the memetic web of meanings I'm in your
class to hear you untangle, then it just might be that I'm not getting
a top-of-the-line education. You know, the old Kabbalist tells the
young one: "Here's a copy of the Zohar, here's a pound of cocaine,
here's a key to the attic. Don't come out until you've gotten through
them both."

Drugs can be great for academia. Oppose this foolish scent-marking of
our halls of learning.