Wellness Center, panel promote drug awareness
Observing the annual April 20 – “420” – tradition of the pro-marijuana subculture, USU prevention specialist Ryan Barfuss and Adam Black, president of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) at USU, organized an open panel discussion about marijuana in the TSC auditorium Wednesday afternoon.
“We wanted to get away from advocating drug use and (focus) more toward reducing the harm,” Black said. “My hopes were, raise awareness and let students ask some professionals what they thought about it.”
The panel consisted of local defense attorney Diane Pitcher, Bear River Mental Health substance abuse therapist Heidi Orosco, Student Health Center director Jim Davis, and Cache/Rich drug task force officers Bill Barber and Anthony Williams. Barfuss moderated the discussion between panel members and the audience.
Barfuss, from the USU Wellness Center, said he wanted to make clear the point, which was not to debate the criminal nature of marijuana but to talk about consequences and benefits of marijuana use in Cache Valley. He said he didn’t think the discussion would, after all, lead to decriminalization of the drug in Utah any time soon.
“The process we’re doing now is what it is now, okay?” Barfuss said. “What’s affecting the students here at Utah State? We could debate the legal issue all day long.”
Pitcher said she feels like prosecutors are distracted by the overwhelming amount of marijuana cases she sees in Utah and Idaho courts and not enough attention is given to other illicit substances.
“I personally would like to see more task-forcing against crimes against people, especially sexual offenses,” Pitcher said.
Marijuana overburdens the legal system and the current laws are not working the way they are supposed to, she said.
“I was a mental health therapist; I worked detox for many years,” Pitcher said. “I’ve seen the effects that heroin and methamphetamine have on people. It does not in any way parallel what pot does. I’m not saying pot’s a good thing, but it certainly doesn’t have the effects in people’s lives that other drugs have.”
Marijuana is a statistically provable gateway drug, Davis said, that still belongs in the same category as the other illegal drugs.
The reason the current laws regarding marijuana do not work, he said, is due to selective enforcement – certain law enforcement personnel in jurisdictions throughout America look the other way and the result is inconsistencies in the effectiveness of the law. Davis said he firmly believes effective law enforcement deters crime.
“Certainly personal selection and personal choice doesn’t deter it,” Davis said, “as evidenced in California where it’s been somewhat decriminalized on a state level. It’s increased the use and increased the problems in society rather than decreasing it.”
Orosco said she also believes drug counseling is an effective way to address the use of marijuana. Not everyone who gets caught with marijuana and comes to counseling has an attitude that they don’t want to change, she said.
It is better to spend money on education and therapy, Williams said, rather than just fines that go to a general state fund. He said this in response to an audience member’s suggestion that court-mandated therapy is ineffective and should be replaced by more punitive fines.
“I firmly believe that the number of psychologists that it takes to change a light bulb is one, as long as the light bulb wants to change,” Davis said. “So I couldn’t agree with you more that mandating therapy is, probably, not effective.”
Davis said that among the adverse effects of prolonged marijuana use are slight physical and sometimes strong psychological addictions. Smoking marijuana also causes respiratory ailments such as bronchitis and possibly even lung cancer, he said.
The most common drug seen by law enforcement in Cache Valley is marijuana, Barber said, but the drugs that pose the biggest problem to society here are methamphetamine and heroin. Marijuana is a problem, but he said he believes there are far worse drugs.
“Overall, the most abused drug, I think can be proven, is alcohol,” Williams said. “Me personally, I’ve probably seen more cases involving alcohol but that doesn’t mean marijuana doesn’t have its place as well. If I were to say the worse drug in the valley, I would say meth.”
Williams said when he took an oath as an officer in the state of Utah, he promised he would uphold the law, so it doesn’t matter what his personal opinion is about whether or not marijuana should be illegal.
Many audience members vociferously supported the decriminalization of marijuana at the panel discussion.
“It’s a complex problem, but that’s not to say it shouldn’t be legalized,” said USU student Dallen Hansen. “I think part of the answer is not to say it doesn’t have harmful side effects. Get past the point of saying it’s harmless and address the real issue with the harms included with it.”
– dan.whitney.smith@aggiemail.usu.edu