Alumni Address New College Administration Drug Crackdown

This letter was formally presented to President Donal O’Shea by the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Rick Doblin, members of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and Sara Gregory on behalf of The Inhibitor this morning, Monday January 4th.

There will also be a forthcoming in-depth interview between Rick Doblin and Sara further discussing issues raised in this letter. The interview will be released in the upcoming January issue.

Dear New College President Donal O’Shea, Students, Faculty, Staff, and Board of Directors,

Decades of peer-reviewed research have consistently shown that harm reduction policies drastically reduce overdose deaths and problematic drug use, without increasing drug use or crime. To best ensure the health and safety of New College students, we strongly urge you to reduce the role of criminalization at New College to the maximum extent possible while adopting health-based approaches to drug problems.

Just to be clear, the War on Drugs is counterproductive, racist, maximizes harms from drugs, funds cartels, criminal organizations and terrorists, endangers national security, and violates human rights, freedom of religion and freedom of thought.

In particular, alcohol and drug use, sale and distribution have always taken place at New College from its inception to this day and will never be eliminated from the New College campus. To protect New College students from drug-related harms, the New College Administration should promote harm reduction policies and involve the criminal justice system only as a last resort.

Whether or not one believes that a given substance is harmful, the oppressive police presence on campus and the New College Administration’s endorsement of no-knock police raids of dorm rooms at 8 AM with guns drawn is more of a risk to the campus community than harm reduction policies. The aggressive anti-drug crackdown by the New College Administration over the last several years has not prevented the two deaths on campus last May. In some senses, Administration policies contributed to the two deaths by creating a culture where students with drug problems and their friends are reluctant to seek help from the faculty and school guidance counselors for fear of being directly funneled into the criminal justice system.

We are aware of the argument by the New College Administration that a no-tolerance, “just say no” policy to drugs is the proper approach. The New College Administration is smarter than that, and should realize that the world is changing around them and that drug policy reform is moving forward internationally. It’s ironic that the latest arrest took place in the Rhoda Pritzker dorm (Z dorm), with the campus also benefiting from the Pritzker Marine Biology Research Center, at a time when Rhoda Pritzker’s son and daughter-in-law, Nick and Susan Pritzker, and grandchildren, primarily Joby Pritzker, are currently key funders and strategists of marijuana legalization efforts throughout the United States, and of psychedelic psychotherapy research.

Nick and Susan contributed this comment to our letter, “The mission of our family foundation, The Libra Foundation, is to promote human rights. As part of advancing that mission, we’ve funded drug policy reform efforts and psychedelic psychotherapy research. It saddens us to hear from alums and students their concerns about the direction being taken by the New College Administration regarding drug and alcohol use on campus, prioritizing responses by the criminal justice system rather than harm reduction policies. That is not the New College culture our family has been so proud to support over the years.”

The sole reason the New College administration exists is to provide students with an environment most conducive to attaining an education at the highest levels of excellence. The very first New College catalog articulated the core values our founders recognized were essential to creating and sustaining such an environment: “New College was named for a purpose. It is not, and never will be another college. It is, and will always remain, the new college, seeking new solutions to educational needs, accepting no dogma without test, striving to eliminate all barriers that inhibit the growth of ideas.”

True academic excellence requires a learning and teaching environment that protects and fosters cognitive liberty: the freedom to think independently and creatively in the search for new solutions to complex problems. Drug use and academic excellence are not inherently mutually exclusive. It’s time to move to a harm reduction approach beyond the simplistic, fear-based thinking that has always driven the war on drugs. New College deserves, and demands, more.

Rick Doblin, New College Class of 1971

Masters in Public Policy, Ph.D in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Founder and Executive Director, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Clancy Cavnar, New College Class of 1978

PsyD, John F. Kennedy University

Dual Diagnosis clinician at Walden House, San Francisco

Co-editor of Prohibition, Religious Freedom and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use (Springer, 2014).

Allen Hopper, New College Class of 1983

J.D., University of California, Davis, School of Law

From 2004–2010, Litigation Director of the National ACLU’s Drug Law Reform Project

From 2010–2015, Director of ACLU’s state-wide Criminal Justice and Drug Policy Project (CJDP)

2015-Strategic, Legal Adviser to Nick, Susan, Joby Pritzker

Earth Erowid, New College Class of 1987

Technical Director and Co-founder, Erowid Center

Fire Erowid, New College Class of 1989

Executive Director and Co-founder, Erowid Center

Jag Davies, New College Class of 2000

Director of Communications Strategy, Drug Policy Alliance

Mitchell Gomez, New College Class of 2002

Masters in Urban and Regional Planning, UCDenver

National Outreach Director, DanceSafe

Ingmar Gorman, New College Class of 2006

M.A., New School for Social Research

Clinical Psychology Doctoral Student, New School for Social Research

Linnae Ponté, New College Class of 2007

Director of Harm Reduction, Zendo Project Director, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies