Is marijuana use on campus trending up?

If you’ve read the Campus Crime section of a recent digital issue of the Muleskinner, you’ve probably noticed the number of entries related to marijuana – in the Feb. 1 issue, 13 of the 25 reports published were marijuana related.

Amy Kiger, director of the office of violence and substance abuse prevention, said through Jan. 31, there have been 45 referrals to VSAP for first-time violators of the campus marijuana policy in the 2017-18 school year. There were 30 such referrals for the entire 2016-17 academic year and 25 in 2015-16.

“We’ve had more violations this year than we’ve had previously,” Kiger said. “Before that it was staying a little steady.”

While referrals to VSAP have increased significantly this year compared to previous years’ numbers, Capt. Bill Brinkley said arrests and referrals by Public Safety have not changed considerably from January 2017 to January 2018.

According to Public Safety records, there were 19 marijuana-related police reports generated in January 2017 involving 37 individuals; eight were arrested and 29 were referred for university discipline. There were 21 marijuana-related police reports generated in January 2018 involving 39 individuals; 12 were arrested and 27 were referred for university discipline.

Both Kiger and Brinkley said discretion is used on a case-by-case basis, keeping in mind the overarching goal is to maintain policy and student well-being while balancing it with student success.

“If you look at it from our perspective,” Brinkley said, “in larger cities, they’ll have a diversion court or a drug court where they give different alternatives rather than just criminal punishments, like jail. If you think about it here, our referrals from the police department go to Student Experience and Engagement, and it works a lot like that. It’s more like a civil diversion court or something along those lines.”

Kiger said in many cases students are referred to the VSAP office because they violated of university policy, but the referral is not meant only to be punitive.

“We have an alcohol and drug policy at UCM because we know that alcohol and drugs can help people not graduate if they’re misused,” Kiger said. “We want to help them interrupt any kind of behavior that might keep them from graduating.”

At the beginning of each year, UCM administers the Missouri Assessment of College Health Behaviors to a random sample of UCM students, a voluntary survey aimed at tracking the behaviors of students on college campuses.

Of the 565 UCM undergraduate participants of the survey in 2013, 71.7 percent said they did not use marijuana at all in the last year. In 2017, 75 percent of the 719 UCM participants said they did not use.

UCM’s survey results are in line with the results reported by Partners in Prevention, which collects survey data from UCM and 21 other universities around the state. In 2013, the PIP results showed 76.1 percent reported no use in the last year, and in 2017 the PIP results showed 70 percent reported they did not use marijuana in the last year, five percentage points fewer than UCM, which may indicate our university actually has less of an issue than other schools.

Kiger said there is a perception of prevalence that simply may not exist.

“Most people think that most UCM students use marijuana, which is not true,” she said.

The percentage of UCM students who believe their peers have not used in the last year has more than doubled, from 8.3 percent in 2013 to 17 percent in 2017. Even so, there is still a gap between the perception of others and what is being reported about an individual’s own habits.

Brinkley said that the existence of a police report does not necessarily indicate a crime has been committed. For example, according to an incident report filed Jan. 16 about an incident that occurred on Jan. 14, an officer was dispatched to the Crossing at South and Holden because of a person potentially smoking marijuana. As it turns out, the person was smoking tobacco, a violation of campus policy but not of the law.

So, is marijuana use on campus trending up? The best answer is… it’s hard to tell. By certain metrics, it would seem to be; by other metrics, it would actually seem to be trending in the other direction, and it’s entirely possible that in a few years, the higher volume of marijuana-related referrals to VSAP this academic year will be an outlier.

For more information about substance abuse and its alternatives, contact the VSAP office in Administration Building 102 or call them at 660-543-4044.