thegazette Friday, March 28, 2014
Volume 107, Issue 92
Reefer in rez Aaron Zaltzman ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jared* recalls a time when he was worried about being caught with drugs in his residence. “Initially, we would lock our door, turn on the fan, open all the windows — those are the lengths we went to when we thought it was serious,” he says, recounting his naiveté as a first-year Western student in residence, more than a few years ago now. The apprehension didn’t last very long though. “At one point my roommate bought a hookah, and it stayed in plain sight so that if the door was open you could see it,” says Jared, now an upperyear computer science student. “That was a signal to us that while the rules were very strict on paper, they weren’t really being enforced and we didn’t really have to worry.” “It depended on which drugs, but marijuana was always readily available, and if I bought drugs from my roommate, very often he would buy them from someone else in residence,” he says. “Before Christmas, when my roommate came back with a bunch of pot, he relied on another guy in residence.” Residence is a staple of university life, and is designed to provide a comfortable environment for new students transitioning to a more independent life and experiencing a lot of firsts. Fill a confined living space with a group of teenagers who are newly independent and looking to make friends, and there are going to be certain realities — one of those realities is that drugs are ever-present. It may not be a peer pressure cooker or anything out of a D.A.R.E. class, but Jared thinks there is something about residence that enables, if not encourages, drug use. “You get a very strong community because there’s so much commonality between a lot of people who didn’t know each other before,” he says. “You feel comfortable talking to each other in a way that you wouldn’t in a classroom. You’re not crossing a significant boundary asking someone where you can get drugs.” Certainly something about residence breeds a sociable atmosphere — almost all residences
will feature scenes of students hanging out in common areas or even drinking together in the hall. Residence makes it easy to meet a lot of new people and therefore gives access to a lot of new opportunities — but it does seem to do something special for access to drugs. Jared says in his residence experience, drugs were even easier to come by than alcohol. “For alcohol you had to go somewhere, and in residence it was common that people weren’t the legal drinking age. If you weren’t legal, you had to find a friend to come with you or buy you alcohol,” he explains. “For weed it was a matter of walking down the hall or going to a different floor, and within five minutes you could be back in your room.” Actually, for Jared things were even easier than walking down the hall. His roommate had a plentiful supply of pot during his time in residence, and eventually his room became known as one of “those rooms.” “It was word of mouth, and at one point I had someone ask me if I knew where to get some pot, and I asked my roommate if he was comfortable with me giving out his name,” Jared recounts. “There was an initial resistance for a day or two, but after that he was okay with me telling other people.” No doubt selling weed is a good way to get to know people in residence, but Jared also says that with a reputation as a source for weed and a ready, intimate customer base, his roommate’s financial opportunities looked pretty good. Jared recounts a time when his roommate offered to get him in on the game. “He suggested that we should wholesale. He said that 20 ounces of marijuana would require a $600 investment, and if we sold by the gram, it would be something like $280 per ounce,” he says, noting that such a business model is basically the essence of capitalism. “The idea was to sell them in residence. A few people around the residence knew to come to him for weed. He figured while he was in residence it was a good plan, and afterwards there would still be a market.” Jared didn’t join in on the investment in the end, but his anecdote is a good example of how
residence offers opportunities for both buyers and sellers of drugs. However, while it may be easy to find marijuana in residences at Western, it doesn’t appear to be an area of worry for the residence managers. “Students smoking marijuana is societal, it happens in high school, it happens at all universities, and it’s not just students,” says Jennifer Ashenden, the assistant director of residences of Western Housing. “I think what happens in residence is fairly reflective of what other people notice in the general community.” For Ashenden, marijuana is a reality of student life, confined to the minority of students — more relevantly, it doesn’t differ too much in or out of residence. She says drug use, like irresponsible drinking, isn’t considered endemic. “Most of the students who live in residence choose not to participate in drugs, and those who choose to drink, for the most part, drink responsibly, believe it or not,” Ashenden says. “Relatively speaking, few students come to our attention for serious drinking or drug use. But yes, drug use is absolutely something that takes place, and it’s certainly something that we follow up on.” From Ashenden’s point of view, residence may in fact hinder drug use. She thinks the supervision that comes from the residence staff and in-house sophs would be enough to make drug use more difficult in residence than out of it. “There are several hundred other students who could report you without you knowing, so I’m not so sure that it’s easier,” she says. “It would seem to me that you could smoke pot in a house off campus and nobody would be any the wiser, whereas there are a lot more eyes in residence.” However, as Jared’s anecdote demonstrates, the supervision may not be that large of a deterring factor. Though marijuana is illegal, there seems to be a certain societal tolerance that allows for students to use it in residence without having to fear consequences. “My experience with drugs in residence was that weed was very common, but I also think that culturally weed isn’t considered a big deal among our age group,” Jared explains. “Residence is an >> see DRUGS pg.2 Photography: Kelly Samuel GAZETTE