Local opinion: The most dangerous drug on campus

There is a toxic drug making the rounds on college campuses. It is prevalent across Arizona’s university system, from NAU and ASU, on down to the U of A. Based on interviews I have conducted with campus police, advocates, and doctors, this drug is present at the scene of the crime, including in the bloodstream of perpetrator and victim alike, in virtually 100% of sexual assault cases.

That drug is not fentanyl, it is not ketamine or gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) and it is not Flunitrazepam, better known as Rohypnol, or “roofies.” The drug is alcohol.

As students move into dorms and off-campus housing, they are inevitably told by concerned parents to “watch their drink” lest someone with bad intentions “slip” something inside. But it is what’s already inside the bottle of beer, shot glass of vodka, or ubiquitous red Solo cup that is the problem. Even sage parental advice takes for granted that their kids are consuming this toxic drug, being warned to protect its purity, to not let it out of their sight, and to “stay safe” while imbibing.

But here are the facts. According to the Center for Disease Control, more than 50% of students regularly or semi-regularly consume alcohol while in college, with about 29% engaging in binge drinking, some of which is deadly.

As a professor at the University of Arizona who teaches the largest criminology course on campus, I hear stories about misguided concern for student safety every day. Students tell me how their family members from across the country warn them about “date rape drugs” in the same breath they caution them about cartel members, sex traffickers, and local gangs. Taught to run and hide from bad guys, students hole up in their dorm rooms when not attending on- and off-campus house parties, scared to walk in the dreaded dimly-lit places or venture over to 4th Avenue, let alone visit the “South Side.” But the data tells us another fact-based story.

College students are one of the safest cohorts of humans that has ever existed. “Stranger danger” is simply not their reality relative to the harms they perpetrate against each other, and almost always while under the influence of a substance they purchased at the local liquor store, ordered from a bar, or were served at a party.

But as I have pointed out in a previous commentary, crime realities are hard to accept for too many people who want to believe the ghosts they fear most are real, while turning a blind eye to the more prevalent causes and contexts of harm. So in denial of the effects of alcohol are parents, ER doctors at each of the local hospitals in Tucson have told me about rightfully concerned parents demanding toxicology reports for their children, usually daughters, who have surely been “drugged” with “roofies” that had to have been “slipped” into their drinks. What else would explain the amnesia, the nausea, and the acute poisoning that landed their child in the emergency room.

As researchers and experienced health care professionals across the US will tell you, Rohypnol is exceedingly rare, detected in about 0.5% of sexual assault cases on college campuses over the past few decades. And when it is found, it is all too often consumed willfully and recreationally. None of this is to say drugs are not a main part of the story about safety, or that the absence of “roofies” lessens the devastation of rape. But it is the wrong drug we continue to look for, and therefore the wrong care we continue to provide.

Just as I argue when advocating for a reality-based view of crime and safety, if we insist on chasing ghosts and listening to urban legends that often stem from partisan lore, we are choosing paranoia over prevention and perpetuating convenient storylines over actual care. I worry about my own kids and students enough to warn them that despite what they see and read on their screens, the drug to watch out for is probably already in their hand, just as the person to harm them is most likely already in the room.