HIGH MINDED

Sophomore Smokes Out UW's Hypocritical Drug Policy

With 65 percent approving, University of Washington students passed a
referendum May 10 advising the school to equalize penalties for
alcohol and pot. That's the first step in changing campus policy.

Currently, according to UW's official alcohol and drug-abuse
statement, students are prohibited from using either substance on
campus: "Violation of the University's alcohol and drug prohibitions
is cause for disciplinary or other appropriate action."

However, according to Tim Kelly, the sophomore behind the pot vote
(he's the president of UW's chapter of NORML/SSDP, the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and Students for
Sensible Drug Policy), there's a disparity when it comes to
enforcement. Residential advisers, who are like dorm moms, have
repeatedly told Kelly they are allowed to simply pour a student's
hooch down the drain. End of story (even for minors). But if marijuana
is suspected, residential advisers are required to call the UW
police--and then students face arrest, suspension, expulsion, or
eviction from student housing.

Chris Jaehne, assistant director of residential life, confirms most of
Kelly's depiction, but maintains that alcohol infractions are written
up and minors could face punishment.

"The penalties for each substance should reflect the harms of the
substance to the individuals," Kelly says. "The system the school has
for alcohol works fine, so they should use that system for marijuana."

So Kelly, who's studying to become a doctor of psychology, approached
the student government's board of directors earlier this year and
persuaded them to place the penalty-equalization measure on the annual
ballot. To illustrate the relative safety of pot to alcohol, Kelly and
other supporters campaigned by staking flags in the campus lawn to
represent annual fatalities from alcohol, aspirin, and tobacco; in an
adjacent field, there were no flags, representing zero recorded deaths
from marijuana. But despite passing handily, the measure is only a
political statement--students cannot actually change the school's drug
policy.

Next, UW's student-elected senate will consider a companion
resolution, which, if successful, would demonstrate sweeping support
from students and student government for biding reforms. But the
student senate cannot alter administrative code, either.

So here's Kelly's plan: If the senate passes the companion resolution,
he intends to leverage the mandate from both votes when lobbying UW
administrators next year to "work out a deal so RAs are not required
to call the police." While it's uncertain if the UW president would
permit the changes, Kelly has already spoken to some members of the
administration and believes codifying the reforms is possible.

"I think people would prefer that cops on campus could respond to a
robbery instead of being caught in someone's dorm investigating a
marijuana case," he said.

At first, Kelly seems your archetypical pot-smoking college student. A
skinny 19-year-old, he wears the requisite baseball cap and he likes
to listen to the psychedelic trance of Infected Mushroom. He grew up
in Woodinville and was once arrested for pot.

But Kelly's interest in marijuana is driven not by drug culture, but
rather science. He recounts spending afternoons after high school
studying the human brain and Erowid.org, an encyclopedic journal on
drugs with thousands of entries authored by chemists and users. (If
you've never checked it out, Erowid is the most comprehensive,
readable, and thoroughly documented resource for drug research on
earth.) "I became fascinated with drugs," he said. "Erowid opened my
eyes to the truths about substances and I found that they're not as
bad as we've been told."

For instance, Erowid busts the myth that marijuana causes
amotivational syndrome, the condition that allegedly turns good
students into dropouts. It turns out the theory was developed after
scientists doped up adolescent monkeys, which became layabouts. But
those findings are contradicted by a study conducted by the U.S. Army
on adult humans, who maintained their vigor.

"More people become physically addicted to alcohol than marijuana, and
nobody has ever died from marijuana," Kelly notes in his list of
discoveries. "Alcohol increases reckless behavior but marijuana makes
you more cautious."

UW joins a trend as the 12th university to pass a campus
penalty-equalization measure since 2005. University of New Hampshire
administrators fully equalized penalties in response to their campus
measure, whereas the brass at University of Maryland has stubbornly
refused.