From study enhancers to bong rips, American colleges remain a hotbed for illegal drug experimentation. The Daily Beast finds the 30 institutions of higher learning where students experiment the most.
The college experience is all about stepping out of your comfort zone and trying new things. For some college students, that includes experimenting with drugs, from Adderall to acid to marijuana.
It’s no wonder, then, that the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy singled out university students as a group particularly prone to drug abuse in its latest strategy report.
“Reducing substance use behaviors among college students requires prevention strategies at the college or university as well as in the surrounding off-campus community,” according to the White House report.
With the seriousness of college substance abuse in mind, The Daily Beast crunched the numbers to find the 30 druggiest campuses in America for the second consecutive year. We took into account three data points. First we turned to College Prowler, the largest student-rating database, to find the institutions with the lowest “drug scene” grades. A low grade indicates that there is more peer pressure to use unprescribed medications and illegal drugs, and that illegal drugs are generally more noticeable. This year we considered only schools with a drug-safety grade of C+ or worse. The drug-safety grade accounted for 40 percent of the final ranking.
We then considered on-campus arrests for drug-law violations at each school, with 2010 data from the U.S. Department of Education also accounting for 40 percent of the final ranking. We calculated a drug-arrests-per-capita metric for each school, based on the Department of Education’s student-enrollment numbers.
For the final 20 percent of our ranking, we took into account each campus’s surrounding environment, using data on statewide illicit drug use for 18- to 25-year-olds from the 2008-2009 U.S. Department of Human Services National Survey on Drug Abuse.
A vibrant social atmosphere might make your alma mater one of The Daily Beast’s top party schools—and might also make it one of America’s 30 druggiest colleges.