A couple of weeks ago, a Reed student died of a heroin overdose. This followed another near-death last December from the same cause. And I have been thinking I should say something about that, but haven't thought of what exactly to say. Then Jenny's blog led me to this article from The Oregonian.
And now I'm pissed.
The author, Susan Nielsen, begins her piece "Reed College can't handle the drugs anymore." She goes on to tell the stories of the two students who OD'd, then writes that it's time for Reed to "adopt a stricter policy toward hard drugs -- or at least to stop hiding the problem."
Wait just a fucking minute. There are a lot of negative things you can say about Reed, and you can even argue semi-successfully, I think, against Reed's "libertarian" drug policy. But it is completely ridiculous to say that Reed "hides the problem." If there is one thing drugs at Reed are not, it's hidden. They are open, everywhere. Nielsen goes on to say that Reed students produce a "campus guides that give detailed, chummy advice about every kind of drug." Unless something major has changed, that chummy detailed guide tells you pretty point-blank that heroin can kill you. Even if the tone isn't from on-high like good "Just Say No" propaganda, and even if its similarly honest about how good the drugs can make you feel, it isn't like it skips the part where you can be dead at the end. Seems to me that is exactly the opposite of hiding the problem.
It is a tragedy that this student died. The picture Nielsen paints, of an 18 year-old kid overdosing alone in a dorm room, is definitely a startling one. But it has almost nothing to do with Reed's "culture favoring tolerance and experimentation." There was no point in my experience with the tolerant and experimental culture where doing heroin alone in my dorm room seemed like an acceptable choice, nor was there, I'd wager, in most Reed students' lives. The whole point of the tolerant and safe culture is that you do your drugs knowingly, safely, and communally. There is a greater degree of safety in being able to talk openly about it, and in not having to hide it. That doesn't at all sound like what was going on with this kid.
What bugs me the most about the article, though, is the way the author presents Reed students' attitude. While she's right in calling students "free spirits and original thinkers" and saying that they feel that drug polices are an affront, she misses that part where that's about self-governance. It's not about anarchy, or about being allowed to be stupid, or about "misguided ideals about hard drugs." It is about Reed having a decades long history of making and enforcing its own rules, of treating its students as citizens rather than guarded children, and of giving them the freedom and space to make their own decisions, not individually, like this poor kid in his dorm room, but collectively. If Reed students are affronted, it's not because they are afraid someone is going to take their drugs away. They're smart enough to know that it is very possible for them to just do them in a sneakier manner, like every college kid everywhere else is doing. What is an affront, though, is the idea that because of this one tragedy, the tradition of self-governance is, as Reed's president put it "not working."
Comments (1)
Amen. I am too angry to refute every stupid thing in that article. But at the base level, how do the odds of 1 out of a gazillion instances equal a total failure? it's ridiculous.
More drug laws equal more people doing drugs in hiding. Like, alone in their dorm rooms, say. I definitely think the more drug laws at reed, the less open it has become. Hence shit like this.
And this from someone who did about the fewest drugs possible while at Reed. :)
Posted by jenny | April 23, 2008 1:36 PM