Dream Funding Rotation

By: Lynda Otero

College is an experimental time for everyone. From your identity to what communities you belong to, it feels like you are figuring out everything. Of course, you are also encountering more opportunities to experiment with things like partying and recreational drug use. I have found that there are two approaches to this truth: first to ignore it and second to make it worse. We know it is a normal thing for students to encounter, yet we pretend that those who partake are inherently evil and irresponsible. 

The real issue is that our current strategies to address student drug use are dangerous and cost us student lives. Every year, before big football games or holidays or campus spirit days, we get an email about being responsible, finding peers we trust, and how if we have an issue to call on-campus police. And every year, there is news of parties gone wrong. Young people not having the tools to help their friends or even knowing what to do in the first place. However, we are lucky if we even hear about the tragedies, let alone if our institutions do anything about it. I have gotten more candy thrown at me at my university's main plaza than I have ever gotten Narcan. The tools I do have, calling the on-campus police, do not give me comfort. These are the same police that have hit my peers with batons for advocating for the rights of our unhoused community. Even if I did have Narcan, I am not sure I would know how to use it because there are no conversations about what to do. It is only ever 15 minute videos emailed at the beginning of every term that I have to take a two question quiz on. 

Universities should invest in creating harm reduction programs for their students, not ignoring or vilifying them and leaving it up to the police. They should be protecting their students with expanded programs on safe consumption and how to help your peers, but honestly they should not take all the blame for the lack of these programs. Our educational institutions do not have the resources or enough funding to do what they need to protect students. With the federal government already taking huge blows to what Californians in higher education care about most, their precious research echo-chambers, it is only to be expected that our scarce resource centers are next. This means our issues go further ignored. That is why we need the funding coming from our own state, why we need to reform Prop. 13. 

With basic programs already on the chopping block, we will never achieve the future young students deserve, one with ample resources, without generating more revenue. Why should billionaires get to pocket billions while our students suffer? Maybe we have to put it in terms they’d understand: there is no future workforce to exploit if we can’t even make it out of university because you hog all the money. Reform Prop. 13.