PSU RANKED NO. 1 IN DRUG BUSTS

Does ranking show a bad problem or good response?

First comes the distinctive aroma, then the complaint and a knock on the
door. Soon, a startled undergraduate is facing down a Penn State University
police officer intent on searching the dorm room for drugs.

Usually it's marijuana, and the student doesn't hide it. But once or twice
a week police need a search warrant and occasionally drive up to 25 miles
off campus to get it.

"Sometimes it happens at midnight or one o'clock in the morning, and we
have to get a magistrate out of bed," said university Police Director Tom
Harmon.

The searches are partly why Penn State, a place more comfortable with its
reputation for research and football, now holds another distinction. A
survey due out today in The Chronicle of Higher Education says more drug
arrests are made there than on any other campus in America.

Penn State's main campus, where more than 41,000 students are enrolled,
logged 173 drug arrests. It's the second consecutive year the school has
recorded the largest total.

After Penn State, the highest number of drug arrests occurred at Indiana
University in Bloomington, 170; the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
166; the University of Washington at Seattle, 149, and Arizona State
University, 139.

Nationwide, campus drug arrests rose by 5.5 percent, continuing a
decade-long trend. Arrests for liquor law violations notched up by 4.7
percent, according to The Chronicle analysis.

Crime is a highly sensitive topic for image-conscious schools. Rising drug
and alcohol arrests will further fuel a debate about whether the problem
has worsened or colleges simply are doing more about it

Harmon, in an interview Friday with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, attributed
Penn State's high arrest total to factors such as its size, that nearly
14,000 of its students live in college housing and that current school
policy requires residence hall staff to report suspected drug use.

And there are other factors, he said, like the Bryce Jordan Center, an
on-campus venue that often draws 10,000 concert-goers.

"You might count on three or four marijuana [arrests] coming out of that,"
he said. "It depends on the concert, the kind of group we have and the crowd.

"I really don't think that Penn State students use drugs more than students
anywhere else."

The Chronicle's survey is based on 4,711 two- and four-year schools that
are eligible to get federal financial aid and are required to file crime
statistics with the U.S. Department of Education. The figures are for 2001,
the most current year for which national data are available.

Security on Campus, a King of Prussia, Pa., group that has led a crusade to
improve campus crime reporting, said it believes schools have figured out
that one crime leads to another.

"I think the numbers [of arrests] for alcohol and drugs are going up
because schools have realized that violent crime is fueled by drug and
alcohol abuse," said Howard Henry Clery, the group's executive director.

Dr. Henry Wechsler, a leading national researcher on the subject, said the
answer may be more complex.

Drug use does appear to be increasing among college students, as it is in
high schools, said Wechsler, director of college alcohol studies at Harvard
University's School of Public Health. But campus alcohol behavior is
polarized, he said, with increases in both those who drink excessively and
those who abstain.

More arrests "may, to some extent, reflect heavier drinking, but it may
also reflect that colleges are paying more attention to this," he said.

Many factors influence crime data, from the size of the student body to the
fact that some schools are more diligent in reporting offenses.

The schools with the largest number of alcohol arrests were Michigan State
University, 898; the University of Wisconsin at Madison, 882; Western
Michigan University, 577; Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, 476;
and Indiana University in Bloomington, 449.

Experts say drug offenses most frequently involve marijuana. Harvard
University research indicates that marijuana use by college students grew
by 22 percent between 1993 and 1999.

At Penn State, the state's largest campus, Harmon said marijuana accounts
for better than 95 percent of the drug arrests. He said police also
periodically find club drugs like Ecstasy, or LSD and psychedelic mushrooms.

There were 112 drug offense arrests in residence halls, compared to 17 two
years ago.

Nationwide, there were 18 cases of murder or non-negligent manslaughter on
campuses in 2001, one less than the previous year, The Chronicle found.
Forcible sex offenses like rape, sodomy and fondling rose by 9 percent to
2,125.

Experts say sex offenses often go unreported, so the true total may be
substantially higher.

Nationally, weapons violations grew by 10.5 percent to 1,478. Several
campus officials with high arrest totals for those offenses told The
Chronicle they mainly involved weapons other than guns.