For a brief moment this week, it appeared that students with a doctor’s permission could legally smoke marijuana at Fort Lewis College, in Colorado. By Tuesday administrators there had clarified the college’s policy to state that marijuana, whether for medical or recreational use, was forbidden on the campus.
“We do not allow it anywhere,” Mitch Davis, the college’s spokesman, said a day after The Durango Herald reported that he had likened Fort Lewis’s rule on medical marijuana to the one governing tobacco use: You can smoke it, but not in your dormitory.
The apparent reversal angered some students at Fort Lewis, including Marisa Williams, president of Safer FLC, the campus chapter of the pro-marijuana group Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation. Mr. Davis’s initial comment had appeared in an article about Safer’s efforts to persuade the college to treat alcohol and marijuana violations the same.
“If a medical-marijuana student had read that and then been arrested” for smoking the drug, Ms. Williams said, “they could have been kicked out of their dorm, lost their financial aid, and not been able to graduate.”
That didn’t happen, however, and by the middle of the week, the campus buzz about cannabis had been eclipsed by news of a bomb threat (timed to finals, of course).
If colleges appear confused about the finer points of medical-marijuana law, that’s understandable. Plenty of drugs are legally prescribed and frequently abused on college campuses—the psychostimulants sold as Ritalin and Adderall are just a couple—but marijuana’s reputation precedes it. Students were rolling it up and smoking it long before 14 states, including Colorado, passed laws allowing their citizens to use marijuana for its health benefits.
Two other factors further entangle the issue: The drug remains illegal under federal law, although Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. recently instructed federal prosecutors to ease up on medical-marijuana users. And medical-marijuana access cards, college administrators and health officials agree, are incredibly easy to get.
In California, which in 1996 became the first state to legalize medical marijuana, officials at Humboldt State University know well how the game is played.
“You don’t need a major diagnosis” to obtain one of the cards, says Rebecca A. Stauffer, director of Humboldt’s Student Health Center. “Insomnia will do it.”
Student-health officials who spoke to The Chronicle acknowledged that marijuana can offer genuine health benefits to people with chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, and a number of other ailments. But “tremendous abuse” of the card system, Dr. Stauffer says, has forced colleges to be wary.
Medical-marijuana users at Humboldt State, Fort Lewis, and other colleges are advised to live off campus and leave their medicine at home.
Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, criticized that stance. “As long as they have any connection to the federal government … all these universities can take a rather weak-kneed approach,” he said. “They can say, ‘The federal government doesn’t allow this.’”
Steven Butler, vice president for student affairs at Humboldt State, sees things differently. The quasi-legal nature of medical marijuana, he observes, has created an atmosphere of confusion and even danger.
“It’s readily available, but it’s still illegal enough that crime is associated with it,” he says. “It’s kind of like Prohibition.”
As other states weigh medical-marijuana laws of their own, Mr. Butler has some advice for colleges: “Make rules that are more prohibitive than the state’s rules. You can do that.”
