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Marijuana activists want college officials to relax

Marijuana advocates who say pot is safer than alcohol want colleges to wade into a hazy debate over whether schools’ tough pot penalties are actually worsening their drinking woes.

They argue that stiff punishments for being caught in a campus dorm with pot steer students to booze and add to binge drinking, drunken brawls and other booze-soaked troubles.

“You know, when you get high on marijuana you don’t act violent — you just kind of sit there,” said Mason Tvert, leader of a Denver-based group stoking the marijuana versus alchohol debate.

His group, Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER), has helped students at 13 colleges pass measures calling on their schools to set pot penalties no worse than those faced by underage students caught drinking. So far, no schools have changed their pot penalties, he said.

SAFER calls its nonbinding referendum push the “Emerald Initiative,” a play on the Amethyst Initiative more than 130 college presidents signed last year. The presidents want lawmakers to rethink the national drinking age of 21, arguing that current laws drive college drinking into the shadows and encourage binges.

The leader of the Amethyst Initiative, John McCardell, president emeritus of Vermont’s Middlebury College, says there’s a big difference between the two debates: “The fact is marijuana is prohibited across the board. It’s not a matter of age discrimination, as where alcohol is concerned.”

Tvert says the pot versus booze question is still a valid debate.

“If they’re willing to talk about letting 18-year-olds use a seriously harmful drug, why shouldn’t we talk about whether they should be allowed to use a drug that’s far less harmful?” he said.

Federal statistics show that college students who drink are prone to binge drinking, drunken brawls, accidents, sexual assaults and alcohol poisoning.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism says about 1,700 college students ages 18 to 24 die each year from alcohol-related injuries, and 599,000 more are injured. It also estimates there are more than 696,000 alcohol-related assaults each year — two-thirds of them by students under 21.

The White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy says in its Myths & Facts report that even a moderate dose of marijuana can impair driving performance, and that 15 percent of trauma patients injured while driving a car or motorcycle had been smoking pot.

Studies showing that marijuana affects memory and learning in college-age youth more powerfully than in adults may be one reason schools are tough on pot users, said Scott Swartzwelder, a Duke University professor of psychiatry.
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