Close the Fist, Open the Heart: Cannabis in Schools

In what could act as a tiny microcosmic metaphor for the entire philosophy behind the unbridled failure of most modern drug policy, a joint force of scientists from Seattle’s own University of Washington and the University of Melbourne has conducted a study on youth cannabis recidivism rates. The study asked: how likely were children who were suspended for cannabis use to go back to using the drug after suspension?

Researchers studied the cannabis use rates at schools that had a suspension policy for illicit drugs versus schools that instead referred kids to counseling for drug infractions.

The results? In schools that had suspension policies, kids were about 1.6 times more likely to use cannabis again within the next year. In the schools that sent kids to counseling, a full 50 percent less students returned to the ganja.

The state of Washington and Victoria, Australia were selected for this study because the regions share a similar size and demographic, however they have vastly different approaches to dealing with drug use among their students. Schools in Washington are more prone to suspension or calling the cops while the schools in Victoria generally lean toward counseling and minimizing harm. The study discovered that cannabis use among Washington students was higher than the Victoria students.

The bottom line: punishment for drug use never really works. Gentler options that have no future-destroying potential, like therapy ,work at a much higher rate. Let’s extrapolate that to the current US drug policy and prison system that is overflowing with non-violent drug offenders. Punishment only leads to more drug use and a craftier black market.

By no means am I suggesting that school kids use cannabis, but many of them will try it no matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise. It is asinine to give a high-school kid a criminal record and derail their whole college/future plans because they smoked a joint. I feel the same way about alcohol. A kid who’s busted drinking a beer shouldn’t be stigmatized and put in the system.

These kids should receive some form of course-correction, and, to be sure, there are going to be extreme cases where more drastic things are necessitated, but most incidents are not extreme. I think it’s time we stop treating a little grass in a kids backpack like it was a pipe-bomb or a racist manifesto.

Let’s be realistic here about what actually constitutes a legitimate threat to a child or their classmates.