Photo via Huffington Post
This past week, I was J-Boarded for accidentally leaving a pipe and a candle on my desk over spring break. An hour and a half of my valuable homework time was wasted watching case after case be handled, in what I believe to be not nearly enough time for anyone to plead their case. I got to thinking about the implications of the proceedings regarding these kinds of cases at SLU. What kind of message are we sending to students? By punishing students for leaving paraphernalia around, among other punishable drug and alcohol-related offenses, the message that the University is sending to students is that if you do drugs of any kind or partake in illegal imbibing, it’s fine, as long as you hide it well.
This kind of thinking, even when implied, is incredibly harmful; it exacerbates the problem rather than presenting a real solution. What this message subconsciously allows the population of students addicted to substances to believe is that they don’t have a problem as long as they don’t get caught, and that is neither how addiction works, nor is it a mindset we should be encouraging. Addiction itself is a mental illness and should be treated as such. Punishing people, assumed to be drinking underage or ingesting illicit substances, by forcing them to do community service and pay more money on top of the already quarter-million dollar tuition for a baccalaureate program isn’t an effective mode of discipline for addicted people. First off, what the University is telling us is that we can buy our way out of addiction or do enough good things to make it go away. The University is telling us that our symptoms need to be punished rather than counseled, and whatever they think we’re going to be getting out of it we will not actually be getting. Community service may help people who are damaging their community to better understand it and grow as a person, but to an addicted person community service is not going to teach them anything, because it has nothing to do with the original problem.
There is a bigger issue here we are systematically ignoring, and that is the issue of mental illness. First of all, the University should not be drawing conclusions about people’s supposed drug use without actually having a dialogue with said person. I personally use marijuana as a means of quickly alleviating crippling anxiety and depression, for which there is no emergency anxiety treatment that will work as fast. I am still a good student with an active social life and many interests; this behavior is not detrimental to me. I resent that the University is allowed to come into a private space for which I am paying them an exorbitant amount of money for and, assume things about me as a person based on what they find, and begin disciplinary measures against me without consulting me beforehand. That is foolish, short-sighted, and frankly, shameful for an organization as big and supposedly as devoted to “liberal” thinking as SLU claims to be.
I get that it’s illegal, but it really shouldn’t be and it is still a shame that at not just this University, but in politics across the country there is imbued a general refusal to recognize the helpful properties of THC in particular, and how it has proven to be less harmful than alcohol. Unlike a lot of other people who are ill, I know I am ill. I have struggled with anxiety and depression for half a decade now, and I know what works for me and how to be responsible about my use of intoxicating substances, specifically marijuana and alcohol. In consulting my doctor about the issue, she advised me to continue if it is something that genuinely helps me. I’m not railing lines of coke or shooting up between classes to keep myself going, I’m just so sad and uncomfortable sometimes that a little THC is the perfect boost to get me back on track. If this university wants to pretend that no one smokes marijuana and that there is not a frankly frightening proportion of people who get belligerently drunk on a weekly basis, they are kidding themselves. This is not to say that this behavior is condonable; blackout drinking every night of the week is unhealthy, but it’s not comparable to smoking marijuana in the least. It is a sign of a larger problem that isn’t going to be solved through ignorance of the issue or punishing people without helping them deal with the causes of their behaviors.
There is only so long that we can cover our ears and pretend something doesn’t exist before we have to implement real solutions. This University’s treatment of drug-related issues is an embarrassment to the field of mental health. We have one psychiatrist to prescribe medications for about 2,500 undergraduate students, and she is here only one day a week for a few hours. We have three counselors for that same population. When the National College Health Assessment found that about 30 percent of college students in the year 2011 at some point reported feeling “so depressed that it was difficult to function” and the percentage of millennials with diagnosed mental illness was around 25 percent. If we apply that to SLU, not accounting for increases in the percentage, that would mean we have around 625 students on this campus who are likely diagnosed with a mental illness, and there are about 125 more who may or may not be diagnosed. If all of these people were to seek help as they probably should, that would mean each counselor on this campus would have a caseload of 250 students. Seems a bit unreasonable, right?
So I say this from a place of what I feel to be righteous indignation: How dare you SLU? How dare the administration claim to want the best for their students when they will only provide us with pretend solutions? How dare they claim these things when even in an emergency the medical professionals on this campus are so swamped with patients they cannot fit in another person? How dare they look at an obvious symptom of the stresses of being involved in an educational system that has failed us as students, that has treated us as profit centers, that cannot even promise us a better life if we’re from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and tell us that that behavior needs to be punished rather than mediated? SLU administration, you shock and disappoint me, and if you genuinely want to help us you need to get down in the shit with us and help us save ourselves rather than slapping us on the wrist for things we often cannot help, and don’t have the tools to change.