Campus Hypocrisy: Marijuana Is Safer, But Students Are Pushed to More Dangerous Booze

Two weeks ago, we published an excerpt from the recently released Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? It was so well received, we asked the authors for a second excerpt, which is included below. If you have found one or both of these excerpts compelling, we encourage you to participate in The Great Marijuana Book Bomb taking place today (August 20). The authors have organized a one-day campaign to drive the book to the top of the Amazon.com rankings. If you want to see it reach #1, click on the book title above and make a purchase of your own.

Campuses are a microcosm of the broader society when it comes to alcohol and marijuana use. Although both substances are illegal for students under the age of twenty-one, the punishments for those who use them are far from equal. Most universities impose policies mandating that students who are busted using cannabis will face more severe sanctions than students caught drinking alcohol. We are aware of numerous students who have been removed from campus housing for possessing a small amount of marijuana in their dorm room. Yet these same students would have received a slap on the wrist -- most likely in the form of a warning or campus probation -- if alcohol had been present.

Take Purdue University in Indiana, for example. This school imposes a "zero tolerance" policy for students who are caught with marijuana in their dorms. This means that the possession of any amount of cannabis will result in immediate cancellation of their campus housing contract. By contrast, Purdue employs a "three strikes" policy for underage possession of alcohol. Bob Heitert, director of administration for university residence halls at Purdue, justifies the school's inconsistent policy this way: "Illegal drugs are against the law for everyone, while alcohol is against the law for a larger portion of students but not for everyone. Society seems to take a different approach to alcohol than they do to illegal drugs. We reflect that societal difference."

Universities like Purdue may be bound by a responsibility to punish behavior that is not consistent with the law. But they are not legally obligated to establish stringent penalties, such as enforcing zero-tolerance housing policies or barring students with minor pot violations from ever holding student office, as is the policy of the University of Maryland at College Park. More importantly, they are under no legal obligation to treat students who illegally possess marijuana on campus more severely than they sanction students who illegally possess alcohol. Yet most colleges do?and often for no reason other than a perceived need to reflect existing societal differences. And by maintaining these disparate punishments in the face of student opposition, university governments and their boards of trustees are making a conscious, if inadvertent, decision to steer students toward the use of alcohol.

And what are the ramifications of these kinds of campus policies? First, as we all know, the use of alcohol by college students is rampant. According to data from the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, approximately 80 percent of college students drink alcohol. Figures for binge drinking are even more startling. For instance, more than 44 percent of students surveyed in 2001 said that they had engaged in binge drinking in the preceding two weeks, and more than 22 percent had done so at least three times in that time period. Predictably, these frequent binge drinkers?and those around them?often suffer as a result. As described by George Dowdall in College Drinking, "[F]requent binge drinkers were 7 to 10 times more likely than the nonbinge drinkers to get into trouble with the campus police, damage property or get injured, not use protection when having sex, or engage in unplanned sexual activity."