Chapter Spotlight: Northern Virginia Community College
Jason Matthys, Northern Virgina Community College
My first event was at a club fair in the hallways of my college. Walking up to the table my feelings of doubt and nervousness mounted. As the club fair progressed I started to relax. I thought about all the intelligent people that I had met at the conference and how they all had my back. Surprisingly, the students passing by seemed more interested in our table than any other. It felt good to be reaching out to students and their response was overwhelming. That was the last time that I ever felt nervous when talking about drug policy.
In one semester we accomplished an amazing amount of activities, and since then our chapter’s email list has grown to around 200 members, a phenomenal feat considering the size of our community college. We have held weekly meetings to plan our activities, raised money selling baked goods at weekly tabling events, attended the Northeast and Southeast regional SSDP conferences, hosted a Law Enforcement Against Prohibition speaker, screened a National Geographic Documentary, held a anti-marijuana prohibition protest in Washington DC, and gathered petition signatures for Americans for Safe Access’s letter in support of medical marijuana research. We also ran a campaign to reach out to other students who were attending nearby community colleges as an attempt to spark the creation of new chapters.
I would say that the most fun and exiting thing we did was invite David Otto from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition out to our campus to speak about the shortcomings of the War on Drugs. Upon contacting their office they seemed more than happy to come out and speak to our students. We created a flier and a Facebook group to promote the event and started spreading the word. Our group must have handed out more than 2,000 fliers, I took every chance I had to be outside the front doors to our main building handing out fliers and talking to students. We met with criminal justice professors to ask them if they would offer extra credit to students who attended. On the day of the event the faculty at our school were impressed at how many students had actually shown up. Mr. Otto brought a fine presentation to our campus and the student’s questions were intelligent. We also recruited a photographer and cameraman who filmed the whole event and posted it on Youtube.
I seriously doubt that any of this would have been possible without SSDP’s support.
It’s not that we were not capable of performing these things on our own, we accomplished these things more or less independently from SSDP’s office. SSDP provided much of the inspiration I needed and helped instill in me the courage to take a stand and stop worrying about what peoples’ reactions would be. They provided the blueprint for what an effective chapter leader does and what strategies are effective when talking to people. The War on Drugs will never end if we cannot stand together as one people in opposition to it. SSDP’s network of college students is one of the only things standing in the way of the propagation of Drug War ideology on college campuses.
- Jason Mattys, NVCC
