Campus Change: UMD Continues Fight Against Draconian Marijuana Policy

As most other students relax during the summer months and try to forget about school until the fall, the University of Maryland’s campaign to reform the campus’s marijuana policy continues to wage on. Currently, students are evicted from campus housing for first time marijuana possession offenses, giving them just 48 hours notice to find somewhere else to live. Stacia Cosner, president of SSDP at the University of Maryland, summed up the current situation in a scathing opinion piece published in the campus newspaper, the Diamondback, during the last week of the semester:

“Beyond the arguments of the danger of marijuana, this is an issue of student democratic power… It is our duty as individuals directly affected by residence hall and other university policies to voice the need for change. We have done so, and in the process we have followed the bureaucratic rules. Therefore, there is no reason we should continue to be ignored.”

In the face of a two-year campaign that garnered the support of the student body, the Student Government Association, the Residence Hall Association Senate, the campus newspaper editorial board, and even a Maryland state delegate, Director of Resident Life Deb Grandner effectively told UMD SSDP to go home for the summer and forget about their concerns regarding the school’s overly harsh marijuana policies. Cosner’s piece in the Diamondback made it clear that the chapter has come too far to simply give up now.

In fact, the chapter has already begun meeting during the summer, with out-of-state members contributing to the discussion via Web chats. They are also planning a summer camping retreat where chapter leaders will network and have fun while continuing to plan next semester’s stage of the campaign.

While UMD is home to one of SSDP’s most active chapters, it is also home to the daunting legacy of Len Bias, a star basketball player who, in 1986, died of a cocaine overdose just 48 hours after being drafted by the Boston Celtics. Bias’ roommate later claimed that he did not call paramedics for fear of running afoul of the school’s harsh drug policies. The tragedy sparked a wave of anti-drug rhetoric and legislation across the country, creating some of the most draconian federal drug laws in effect today. Eric Sterling, a current member of SSDP’s Board of Directors and former assistant counsel to the U.S. House subcommittee on crime, told the Diamondback that, “as a result of the Len Bias mandatory minimums, the federal government has misfocused on low- level street-level dealers and stopped focusing on high level traffickers.”

Ironically, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 established High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA), one of which surrounds UMD’s College Park campus. And in a startling discovery by UMD SSDP members, it was recently confirmed that University Police employ a Federal HIDTA agent as part of their aggressive sting tactics that target students, including the creation of a fake Facebook account in an attempt to infiltrate the SSDP chapter. The chapter contacted Facebook, the fake profile was deleted, and an exposé ran in the campus paper.

They say that what goes around comes around, and that’s certainly the case at the University of Maryland. A national hysteria sparked by the unfortunate death of a star athlete two decades ago has funneled money into infiltrating a student organization trying to reverse that hysteria today. But if the strength of the UMD SSDP chapter and the widespread support garnered by their campus change campaign serves as any indication, it appears that the voice of reason has returned to College Park, Maryland, and the tide is starting to turn.

Check out UMD SSDP's website at http://www.ssdpterps.net

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