The Pot Dilemma

...The dean of an excellent college in the Midwest estimates that 20 recent students and teachers, including the chairman of an academic department, have spent time in institutions —hospitals and jails—as a result of over-indulgence with drugs...

...if undercover agents are gathering information on drug usage and sex habits, the faculty may well wonder when agents will begin to gather information on their political and economic assumptions...

...Commissioner Barry's men arrested 30 of them, plus 10-15 hangers-on...

...many are now rightly fearful of lsd and the other halucinogens, but those that aren't just can't be convinced that their next trip may be a bad one...

...If undercover agents are posing as students, the students may well wonder if they arc also posing as faculty...

...Although it is now known that the narcotics squads will use threats, coercion, and undercover agents of one kind or another, it is almost impossible to discover the incidence of these tactics in recent college cases...

...Undercover agents were on the Stony Brook campus for months prior to the January raid, but they did not try to pass as enrolled students...

...For example, recently the president of a private liberal arts college in New England received a call from representatives of the local District Attorney, the Sheriff's office and the State Police, requesting his cooperation in enrolling a young detective as a student for the spring semester...

...He was most reluctant to implicate his college in this kind of arrangement, but he was in a fearful bind...

...Both have denied that the Mafia has moved in on the marijuana traffic...

...and, to paraphrase Hazlitt, no young man believes he shall ever be busted...

...Either he cooperated with the authorities and hopefully spared the college destructive publicity, or he declined participation and got busted anyway, with a vengeance...

...How," the DA inquired, "is the drug situation on your campus...

...certain small private colleges could be nearly wiped out if the student drug culture was widely publicized...

...The use of drugs on college campuses has become an educational problem in the broadest sense, and the Stony Brook affair should, to say the least, be instructive...

...There is evidence that an increasing number of students who have been arrested in recent months have been persuaded to become informers...

...It takes, after all, no more ingenuity to smuggle a pound of heroin than it does a pound of marijuana, and the former will retail for $50,000 while a pound of grass may bring no more than $100...

...Even authoritarian administrators recognize that their own punitive efforts to control drug usage are now limited by the recent interpretations of the search-and-seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment...

...Thus the dean or advisor who allows himself to become an extension of a civil authority regarded by most students—wisely or naively—as unjust and unintelligent will find that his role as counselor on serious intellectual and personal issues has been compromised out of existence...

...Two committees of the State Legislature have been simultaneously investigating conditions surrounding the police action...

...they can't discuss the problem candidly...

...Shortly afterward the District Attorney and the Sheriff came to the president's office to inquire—in the interest of efficiency—how exactly their man had failed to pass academic muster...

...Last month the dean of a small college in upstate New York received a telephone call from the local District Attorney, a man with political ambitions both undisguised and unrestrained...

...These developments are in themselves hardly startling, but they have contrived to create an awful educational conflict, the terms of which can be roughly defined as follows: On the one hand, student consumption of certain drugs (principally marijuana) is increasing...

...College administrators don't even know how many of their students are ingesting what kind of drugs with what frequency...

...The other legislative investigation is being conducted by the Joint Committee on Higher Education, whose chairman...

...He declared his intention to major in business administration, a vocational course that the college does not offer...

...Yet most of them will be obliged to do something, soon...

...One of them, the Joint Committee on Crime, headed by the conservative and exceptionally moralistic Republican State Senator from Syracuse, John H. Hughes, has tried to force 12 members of the Stony Brook faculty to testify about their own knowledge of drugs...

...On the other hand, teachers and administrators who look to the civil authorities to handle the drug problem can anticipate the subversion of their educational and moral values and the erosion of their influence among students...

...It would seem to be merely a matter of time, therefore, before the police employ an agent bright enough to pass unnoticed in the best liberal arts colleges...

...He believes that new and "heroic" measures will have to be devised to enforce the law on campuses...

...Democratic Assemblyman Joseph Kottler of Brooklyn, is considerably more sympathetic to the dilemma of the educators...

...In one sense, in fact, it is more dangerous than any of the many other crises that have set the academic tone of our times...

...There seems to be little if any heroin on campuses...

...As for lsd, last December Federal agents arrested a young chemist who had once studied at the University of California and charged him with manufacturing 10 million doses in his home laboratory in a San Francisco suburb...

...Members of this committee have accused the Hughes Committee of conducting a witch-hunt, and the Suffolk County Police of employing "Gestapo tactics...

...Sheriff's deputies at the scene freely offered to help the reporters flesh out their stories with eyewitness accounts of student sexual arrangements, room decor, and general living conditions in the dorms...

...One element of this new heroism, apparently, will be to require college administrators to disclose information on student activities and to accept undercover operatives posing as students on their campuses...

...The problem here is that most teachers and students know, or will learn, that the trade in marijuana, methedrine, amphetamines and lsd is largely informal, unstructured, and not-for-large-profit, if any...

...and they don't know what is best to do when the cops come calling...

...That is, at the least they are no longer capable of doing useful academic work...

...And he will not regain respect by instituting compulsory "group therapy" sessions, a form of "treatment" that is morally presumptuous and psychologically absurd...

...Bound in a loose-leaf cover emblazoned with the heraldic device of a helmeted knight, this contained maps, floor plans of campus buildings, and intelligence sheets providing information on the personal habits of some students...

...And college presidents realize that the sensational publicity which inevitably accompanies drug raids impairs their appeals to foundations, banks, and potential benefactors...

...All were booked on charges of drug possession, and in New York State this means a mandatory five-year sentence upon conviction...

...Any student at Stony Brook arrested for possession of any drug must now submit to this punitive practice for four-and-a-half hours each week...

...Piedmont (Georgia) College, Pennsylvania Military College, Kansas Wesleyan University, Eastern Illinois University, Eastern New Mexico University, and many similar schools...

...Commissioner Barry has told the Hughes Committee that Stony Brook President John S. Toll and Dean David Tilley declined to "cooperate" with the police in previous drug raids...

...The administration at Stony Brook, Dr...

...Toll testified, has issued numerous warnings against the personal and legal dangers of drug usage...

...The Federal Bureau of Drug Abuse Control has 299 investigators assigned to "pill control"—barbitu-ates and amphetamines—and yet the Bureau has beea unable to establish a pattern for the black market distribution of pills...

...This is no longer a matter of the generational gap, flower power, acid rock, or psychedelic sports—the cultural spasms that most intellectuals have never taken very seriously in themselves anyway...

...They had arrived in 72 cars, carrying arrest warrants for 21 students, and copies of a 107-page mimeographed booklet entitled "Operation Stony Brook...

...If the deans at Yale won't talk, it's not likely that those at Kansas Wesleyan will either...

...Detective Captain Stanley Davenport says that 90 per cent of the students arrested on drug charges have "cooperated" with the police to avoid prosecution...

...Last month's drug bust on the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York has shaken college administrators across the country...

...Senator Hughes, a very influential member of the Republican majority who is best known to the public for his zealous campaigns against obscene literature, has decided that student drug usage constitutes a threat of major proportions...

...He would only go after the commercial sources of supply and "those students who were no longer students" but were now preoccupied with the drug trade...

...Classified defense research is an odious business, but it has so far affected only the more exotic echelons of a few institutions...

...The issues of the "free speech controversy" and "student power" could at least be discussed openly...

...Moreover, college officials feel that their own "educational" programs just don't work: The students know that a little grass won't hurt them...

...So it would seem that the crime syndicate from which students must be protected is largely a mythical one...

...on the morning of January 17, Suffolk County Police Commissioner John L. Barry led a raiding party of 198 policemen and sheriff's deputies through the Stony Brook dormitories...

...Within five minutes the admissions director was convinced he was a phony, and the college was temporarily off the hook...

...Most of the 5,200 students enrolled at the expanding Stony Brook campus were then studying for semester examinations...

...The most desperate rationale likely to be used in urging college officials to cooperate with the police is the protection of their students from the encroachment of a rapacious professional crime syndicate...

...When the police can't make an arrangement with college officials, they frequently turn to the students themselves...

...The president was assured that once he had arranged for waiver of the young man's tuition fees, he would not have to concern himself with further arrangements...

...Commissioner Barry and his squires routed students from their beds, handcuffed them, and led them outside past a crowd of expectant reporters who had been considerately provided with copies of the battle plan and the time of its execution...

...The National Student Association newspaper, which tries to keep a record of students arrested on drug charges, recorded 24 cases in the first three weeks of last November (by no means all of them...

...Stony Brook may lose a good president or a dean, but it will still have the resources of the State of New York behind it...

...The relationship between the universities and the Selective Service System, while educationally and morally suspect, is a matter of public record, and all the data and variables are known...

...Nor have state and local authorities confined their anti-drug activities to the better universities and liberal arts colleges in the Northeast and on the West Coast...

...Probably few of them, however, yet perceive the full implications of the episode...

...The detective would be able to make admissions requirements on his own merits, he would conduct himself convincingly in the classroom and dormitory, and the president would not need the complicity of the faculty or other administrators...

...In Madison, Wisconsin, for example...

...In return for his cooperation, the president was promised that the undercover operative would not finger any "real" students who might be casual pot smokers...

...At 5 a.m...

...It is already a policy of state and county law officers in many Eastern states to plant undercover agents on any campus where students are suspected of using drugs (and that could include every college in the East...

...You know, we wouldn't want anything like that Stony Brook mess to happen around here...

...A number of otherwise tolerant parents have withdrawn their sons and daughters from some schools because of information, usually provided by their own children, that drugs are widely available on those campuses...

...The president of this college is a liberal man who has defended his faculty against political investigation and his students against their parents...

...Although most educators have no idea how many of their students experiment with drugs, which drugs are dangerous, or what "dangerous" even means in this context, it appears that a significant minority of students in the best colleges and universities are either distracting or disabling themselves with drugs...

...What dean, after all, would not guard his campus against the commercial interests of the Mafia?whether they were selling drugs, coeds, or skin movies...

...He had been asked to bring his "high school records" and showed up instead with a framed diploma...

...Well, could the dean give him some facts and figures—and a few names wouldn't hurt...

...Professional educators, heretofore virtually without any interest at all in drugs, face a new campus crisis that will require more knowledge of drugs and their role in American society than the specialists with their limited interests —psychiatrists, pharmacologists, narcotics officers, hip journalists, college freshmen—have been able to provide...

...What specifically did he want to know, the dean replied...

...A few pounds of marijuana, some bottles of pills, and several homemade water pipes were confiscated...

...President Toll has disputed Barry's testimony point by point, and he believes the Commissioner's attitude and actions were based on a "misunderstanding" of the college's position on drugs...

...The use of informers posing as students is clearly a tactic of a police state, and the president or dean who cooperates with such an arrangement will risk the destruction of whatever mutual trust and open regard still exist between students and their teachers...

...Of course, this figure represents only 1 per cent of the college's population, and it may also be argued that these people had serious psychological problems to begin with...

...A few days later the young detective appeared at the college's admissions office...

...He has made it clear that his elaborate preparations and dramatic execution of the January raid, and his decision not to give the college officials advance notice, were in retaliation for their cool response to his policies...

...Arrests were made at Berkeley, Yale and NYU—but also at Hutchinson (Kansas) Community College...

...He decided to cooperate...

...I'm going down to New York tomorrow," the DA explained, "for the Hughes Committee hearings...

...This is one reason why the police have been driven to the use of undercover agents...

...But there is nothing mythical about the crisis created by students experimenting with drugs, and the legal response to it...

...Most deans these days, though, cannot assuage their fears with either statistics or theories...