The newcomer walked in to the party and took his place among the throng of unsuspecting first-years. After asking the hosts to turn down the music, he then said that he’d need their alcohol. An awkward way to ask for a drink, perhaps.
The party’s host, Mark, a current sophomore who asked FM to keep his name private because he does not want to be associated with the event, didn’t think much of the odd visitor at first. Reaching into his desk, Mark says he then took out a bag of marijuana. That was enough for the visitor, who then asked Mark to cut the music. This mysterious partygoer was shutting this party down. He was a freshman proctor.
Mark feared strict disciplinary action. He soon found himself in front of then- Assistant Dean of Freshman Wendy E.F. Torrance and awaited his punishment: writing a letter explaining that he understood Harvard’s policy on illegal drugs. Torrance then allegedly told him not to do it again.
A November 14, 2005 Crimson article entitled “Harvard Rarely Punishes Student Drug Use” described a lenient atmosphere towards drug enforcement at Harvard that mirrored Mark’s encounter with the administration. The article argues that students are unlikely to face the administrative board for simply smoking marijuana or drinking underage. But according to Assistant Dean of Harvard College and Administrative Board Secretary John “Jay” L. Ellison, Harvard’s policy “is much more strict than the article implies.”
Two months after that article was published, it was revealed that the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) spent three weeks tracking a group of students in DeWolfe, who were subsequently arrested for the alleged possesion of marijuana with intent to distribute. And while the three charged students now have to deal with the courts, they will also have to deal with an administration that, in recent history, has had a less punative response to allegations of drug use.
GOOD TRIPS & BAD VIBES
Harvard Square was a hotbed for drug dealers and experimenters in the 1960s, and according to a March 1965 Crimson story, then-Middlesex Superior Court Justice Frank W. Tomasello alleged that institutions like Harvard were to blame. “Tax-free institutions,” he said during the 1965 sentencing of an accused 19 year-old drug dealer, “should screen out those they let in.”
Dana L. Farnsworth, then-director of University Health Services, reacted in The Crimson. “Perhaps a few more people than usual are experimenting with drugs.”
The University responded to criticism by sending drug users to psychiatrists or putting them on probation. But then-Dean of the College John U. Monro ’34 struck a harder line. “In sum,” The Crimson reported he wrote in a letter to the freshman class, “if a student is stupid enough to misuse his time here fooling around with illegal and dangerous drugs, our view is that he should leave college and make room for people prepared to take good advantage of the college opportunity.”
The College’s hard line, however, did not seem to impede the experimentally-ambitious.
“The mid 60s were a time of great tumult in the United States,” says James F. Calvert ’67. “Drug use was an important part of the general atmosphere of rebellion.”
Calvert, then a senior at the College, believed that The Crimson was giving drug users a bad rap.
He responded by writing an open letter to the freshman class endorsing the use of LSD. He faced no discipline from the College.
The 1960s, though, were not necessarily an exceptional time. Wade Davis ’75 claims that the 70s were just as raucous. “Marijuana was simply the backdrop of the era,” he says. Davis doesn’t remember any drug busts or police conspiracies to break up campus happenings, and he believes that enforcement was “pretty laissez-faire.”
“The University basically turned a blind eye to it,” says Davis.
Beginning in 1967, freshman proctors were instructed to remind their charges about the punitive consequences of drug and alcohol use, but Victoria W. Wulsin ’75 does not remember being warned. “But maybe that’s just because I wasn’t listening,” she says.
Although obviously popular among students, the University’s laissez-faire attitude towards drugs eventually got the school into hot water. In 1986, then- Secretary of Education William J. Bennett called Harvard’s lack of anti-drug action “unconscionable.”’
“What Harvard fails to do,” he said, “others will fail to do.”
TAKING THEIR CHANCES
In a more recent incident, two Currier House residents pled guilty to the possesion of an assortment of drugs in 1996 after what HUPD told The Crimson in April 1996 was a six-to-eight week investigation. The students pled guilty to possesion in a school zone, and the College did not allow them to walk with their class during commencement. In the end, hough, the duo did graduate.
These days, Ryan M. Travia, director of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services at Harvard, tells FM that the College has no interest in “sniffing” underneath students’ doors. He does say, though, that the University is ready to respond. “When a situation comes to the attention of a College officer, the expectation is that it will be addressed,” he says.
The College has decided, according to Travia, to remain as fair as possible in light of the law, and Ellison agrees.
“I believe that our enforcement policies have always had to follow those of the Commonwealth and Federal statutes,” Ellison writes in an email. “We might have changed in response to changes in the law, and it is possible that individual attitudes have changed, but I don’t think enforcement has changed independently.”
Though HUPD’s stake-out means the alledged DeWolfe tokers may end up with a police record, if precedent proves anything, they’ll be walking with their class.
