Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 7, 1991 TAG: 9104070226
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D/1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MICHEL MARRIOTT NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But most students and experts say the evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, points to declining drug use among college students.
Some students said they were concerned that the raid, in which 12 students were arrested on charges of selling and distributing marijuana, LSD and hallucinogenic mushrooms, could revive images of college students as "party animals," although none said they feared their campuses would be targets of future federal crackdowns like the one at UVa.
Some students and police officers said they had noticed at least some revival of the use of LSD and other hallucinogens typically associated with college hedonism of the late '60s and early '70s.
Almost all those interviewed agreed that alcohol abuse is still the major cause for concern.
"We're not seeing an increase in drug use," said Douglas Tuttle, director of public safety for the University of Delaware in Newark, Del. "If anything, alcohol is the drug of choice."
Tuttle, who is also chairman of the government relations committee for the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, said other campus police chiefs had told him that drug-related offenses on their campuses had generally declined for a decade or more.
Recently released surveys of high school and college students have found a "significant downturn" in the use of crack, a most potent form of cocaine, in both groups.
Adults from the ages of 19 to 28 and who had graduated from high school showed similar decreases in general drug consumption, according the study released in January by the University of Michigan.
And in 1990, a third of all high school seniors said they had taken at least one illegal drug in the past year - down from a peak of 54 percent in 1979, the study found.
"We are seeing a continuous decline in the proportion of these populations who are actively using any illicit drugs," said Lloyd D. Johnston, a social scientist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, which produced the study.
In the high school class of 1990, those who said they had used hallucinogens, like LSD, at least once in the last year totaled 5.9 percent, as against 5.3 percent who said they had used cocaine, 27 percent who had used marijuana and 80.6 percent who had used alcohol.
All those percentages except hallucinogens were lower than those reported by the class of 1989; hallucinogens went up by three-tenths of 1 percent.
In South Padre Island, Texas, a beach resort near the Mexican border where thousands of college students flock to celebrate spring break, Capt. Tommy Atkinson of the police said alcohol-related crimes were by far the most common, but there have been a few drug arrests and one significant confiscation of LSD.
"About 80 percent of our arrests are for public intoxication," he said. "But it's kind of strange, these hallucinogenics are starting to re-emerge. Two weeks ago we arrested a 19-year-old man with 50 `hits' of LSD. With that much on him, it was pretty clear to us he was there to sell it."
The man was a student at the University of Texas at Austin, the captain said.
Sgt. James Beck of the Austin Police Department's narcotics division,said: "There's no doubt about it, LSD is coming around again.
"It's screwy, too, how they're making it. We're seeing it soaked into cardboard instead of the old paper. That means the LSD is all through the cardboard, and the dose is really big. You take some of that, and you'll get four times the dose you would have gotten with the soaked paper that was around before."
But even as LSD may be reappearing, he said, marijuana is "the drug of choice, as far as drugs go."
Two weeks ago at San Francisco State University, a student was arrested after campus police, acting on a tip, found six packets of marijuana in the student's dormitory room.
Under university rules, the student will be expelled, said Kim Wible, the chief of the university's police department, who said her office receives about 10 calls a semester from students complaining about marijuana smokers in dormitories.
At Georgetown University in Washington, where fraternity life is practically non-existent, students said alcoholic beverages still appeared to be the intoxicant of choice.
"You see some `pot' every once in a while," said Matt Hepler, an 18-year-old Georgetown freshman, referring to marijuana.
"You hear that Washington, D.C. is some kind of cocaine haven, but you don't see much of that sort of drug use here."
At the University of California at Berkeley, a cauldron of radical politics and student experiments with drugs some 20 years ago, times have changed, its administration and students said.
An annual survey of freshmen conducted by the university this school year found a remarkable swing in student attitudes on drugs.
When asked if marijuana should be legalized, 24 percent of the students who answered said it should be, compared to 60 percent who had said so in the 1970s, a college official said.
Jennifer Packer, a 22-year-old senior who is the editor for student, university news of The Daily Californian, an independent student newspaper, said, "It's not like it was 20 years ago; it's not that visible." But she said there were reports about LSD use.
A few years ago at a party in a cooperative housing complex near campus, someone spiked the punch with LSD, she said, and someone else, apparently high on the drug, fell from a roof and was seriously injured.
Other than occasional flashes of high-profile drug use, like when the 1960s rock group, The Grateful Dead, play in or near Berkeley, Packer said, drugs are shoved to the background of university life.
"There is certainly more distance from it than in decades past," she said. "I think there is a health consciousness about drugs these days that make it not cool to do them."
Students at Howard University in Washington, the nation's most prominent predominantly black university, were divided on that assessment.
One, who asked anonymity, said a growing movement of black pride and "Afro-centric" activities on campus had worked to discourage drug use.
But another, Dorian Strith, a 20-year-old architecture student, said the drug of choice at Howard was marijuana. He said there was some use of cocaine - but no crack, which he said was viewed as a poor man's street drug - and no LSD, perceived for years by blacks as a white person's drug.
The drug raid in Charlottesville, Va., was the first of its kind in this country.
Not only were drugs, scales and pipes seized and 12 students charged with selling drugs, but federal law enforcement officials seized the fraternity houses of Delta Upsilon, Tau Kappa Epsilon and Phi Epsilon Pi.
"The magnitude of this dwarfs anything of its kind that has ever happened on the college campus," said Sheldon E. Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education.
The chief difference in the raid, he said, was the Federal involvement in a crime that is usually left to campus and local authorities.
That federal incursion startled many students and administrators on other campuses. And that, some experts said, might be a blessing.
"I think a problem here is that people are talking about a decline in drug use," Mitchell S. Rosenthal, president of Phoenix House, one of the largest drug rehabilitation programs in this country, said Monday.
Even if there is a decline, he said, there is a "good deal of use and has been a good deal of use" of drugs and alcohol on campuses, and administrators should not relent on their efforts to reduce such use.
by CNB