The Future of Drug Reform Is Bright

In mid-March, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy organized a conference attended by 470 campus activists in San Francisco to network, strategize, party and share updates on the War on Drugs and the widening range of youth resistance efforts.

SSDP was founded in 1998 in response to a provision in the Higher Education Act that cut off loans and grants to students with drug convictions--even misdemeanors dating back to high school. Some 200,000 students have lost their financial aid in the years since. In 2007 SSDP pushed Congress to limit the Act's applicability to students whose convictions occurred after they sought financial aid.

"Now our effort," says SSDP acting executive director Matt Palevsky, "is to limit [applicability of] the Act to students convicted of felonies."

SSDP now has chapters on almost 200 campuses and is receiving 40 inquiries a month from students interested in starting chapters at their schools. There are 10 overseas chapters and this year's conference --which was billed as "international"--included speakers from the UK, Canada, Nigeria, Colombia and the Mexican border (El Paso, Texas). A satellite meeting held simultaneously in Lagos, Nigeria, drew 70 students from universities, teachers' colleges and high schools. (A planned video feed of select panels from S.F. was canceled due to technical problems.)

Friday, March 12, the first day of the SSDP meeting was devoted to field trips to outposts of the burgeoning medical cannabis industry in the East Bay. A steady rain couldn't dampen the spirits of students touring Oaksterdam University, the Blue Sky Coffeeshop and Harborside Health Center. "Most of these students were from states like New York and Florida, and had never seen a pound of trimmed buds, let alone a dispensary," says Harborside's purchasing agent, Rick Pfrommer. "We showed them how we evaluate cannabis brought to us by growers -- the bioassay, how we check for mold by breaking open the buds We gave them a look through the 30x microscope The typical response was 'Awesome!' Or, 'If only we had a place like this in Gainesville!'"

The conference proper was held on Saturday and Sunday at Fort Mason. The rain had left the skies a clean, deep blue and sailboats bobbed on the sparkling bay. You might say the panels and workshops literally and figuratively covered the waterfront. Saturday morning, for example, SSDPers could choose between three panels: "What do model marijuana dispensaries look like?" featuring the owners of four thriving enterprises; "Could psychedelics become accepted medicine?" with updates on studies of MDMA and psylocibin; and "How does local and state drug policy reform work?" which covered the nuts and bolts of organizing a ballot initiative.

The psychedelics session drew a standing-room-only crowd and continued on through the lunch break. Panelists from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) presented evidence that psylocibin and MDMA might help terminally ill patients shift their focus from fear of death to making the most of their remaining time. The students' questions, however, focused more on their own use.

"Are psychedelics back?" I naively asked Rick Doblin of MAPS. "If you're talking about college campuses," he said, "Psychedelics never left."

Doblin, 56, has come to appreciate the current generation's approach to reform. "When I first became interested in LSD in 1971," he says, "the attitude was change the system. Immediately. By any means necessary. Knock down the walls. There was tremendous anger because change wasn't occurring fast enough. Nowadays there's an understanding that political change takes time and work. You have to get involved with the committee that makes the rules on your campus and if you don't get the change you wanted today, you keep trying tomorrow."