In Web pages full of small text, the University Housing Code is laid out in anal-retentive detail. Aspiring artists have a page of room-painting rules to digest. The price of lost keys is plainly spelled out. And in case someone has some serious dorm redecoration plans, waterbeds have their own section on the rules and regulations page. Yet there is one part of university policy that doesn’t have a well-written statement but is on the minds of many of the students who go here: Northwestern’s drug policy.
According to a Nov. 12 Daily article, the director of undergraduate residential life said NU does not have a “hard and fast policy” to deal with drugs. This leaves people such as Joseph Ortiz, the Public Affairs Residential College resident charged with having more than 400 grams of marijuana in his room, in an interesting position. Because possession of 30 grams is a felony, he would seem to face serious legal problems. That is, until you examine the university’s enforcement record and discover that things may not be quite as bad as they seem.
Last year, a resident of Bobb Hall was found to have ecstasy, a controlled substance, in his room. Under the law, possession of any amount of ecstasy results in a felony charge. But the student was not charged. He was dismissed from university housing and banned from Bobb for the rest of his time at NU. He said his banishment from the dorm was due to some extenuating circumstances of the case, not the normal university policy.
In 2000, University Police arrested 21 people for drug law violations and referred 36 to the Office of Student Affairs for drug offenses, an increase from the previous year. Many of them didn’t face stiff penalties.
Now, I’m not advocating that students on campus should be given harsher penalties and have their lives ruined because of drug use. They should have the same rights as the president when it comes to denying and ignoring offenses committed in college.
After all, as a nation we have the highest prison population in the Western world and lock up a gratuitous amount of first-time drug offenders. Our prison-industrial complex has been running smoothly for decades because of mandatory sentencing laws. Our “War on Drugs” has proven to be outdated and insensitive to the gravity of drug offenses in this country. Numerous studies by groups such No More Prisons document how drug-sentencing laws have become more strict and have unjustly affected many inner-city neighborhoods.
I guess that means we should be thankful that things don’t get that serious on campus when it comes to drug penalties, but it does raise some interesting questions.
Why are the lenient drug sentences that are being given to NU students not applied to other residents of Evanston?
In The Daily’s Nov. 7 police blotter, the following crimes were reported: possession of a crack pipe, possession of 2.3 grams of marijuana and possession of crack cocaine. All of these offenses are lesser or equal to the ones listed in the top half of this column.
The question is: Who is going to pay the real price for drug use, NU students or people living just a few blocks away?
