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What do you do when you hold a protest rally and nobody comes? If you’re Brendan Miller, you rally on. Burlington’s news media converged on the University of Vermont campus
Thursday in anticipation of a drug-and-alcohol-liberalization rally.
What they encountered, however, was a demonstration of one — a single
student who was prepared and pleased to hold forth in successive
interviews.
That was Miller, a 20-year-old sophomore, who had agreed to be the
local exponent in what was billed by the sponsoring organization,
SAFER, as a day of action by students at more than 80 colleges in 34
states, including UVM. SAFER, short for Safer Alternative for Enjoyable
Recreation, is based in Denver and its mission, according to its Web
site, “is to undermine support for marijuana prohibition by increasing
the percentage of the public that believes marijuana is safer than
alcohol.”
Miller’s chief complaint was that penalties at UVM,
and on many other campuses, are harsher for the use of marijuana than
for alcohol. He delivered the SAFER argument that this disparity
effectively drives students to drink, when marijuana should be deemed a
safer alternative.He
said he knew students who had been caught multiple times for drinking
violations, but who had simply been assigned counseling or
essay-writing and allowed to stay in school; yet he said he knew other
students, with fewer infractions for marijuana, who had been kicked
out.
University policy is “incentivizing students to drink,”
he said. Instead, he said, UVM should “at a minimum” confer the same
punishment for alcohol and marijuana use.
Students at UVM can
face criminal prosecution under state and federal law as well as
disciplinary sanctions meted out by the campus judicial system.
Asked to respond to Miller’s claim that punishments are disparate, UVM’s administration characterized his premise as “faulty.” “Alcohol
and marijuana violation may be treated differently, but unequal
judicial responses are related to the specifics of individual cases,
not to the category of the offense,” university spokesman Jeff
Wakefield said in an e-mail.
“Both students who are
distributing marijuana to fellow students and those supplying alcohol
to minors may be dismissed. If the violation of either campus alcohol
or drug policies is minor, sanctions will be commensurate. Multiple
violations, in either category, even if they’re minor, can result in
serious sanctions, however.”
Miller added that he doesn’t
endorse either alcohol or drug use by students, and that his views were
his own and SAFER’s but did not represent the position of the campus
organization of which he is president, Students for Sensible Drug
Policy.
SAFER contacted him to make its case by virtue of his
role in the student group, he said. He said he didn’t have time to
organize a demonstration — he’d been too busy with exams. |
