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TheDailyBeast.com has placed the University of Maine at No. 4 on their list of ‘America’s Druggiest Colleges,’ behind three other New England universities.
The list, released Monday, used CollegeProwler.com, the largest college student review database, as a starting point to examine “drug scene” grades, which indicate how available illegal drugs are on a certain campus.
From there, The Daily Beast examined recent data on illicit drug, marijuana and cocaine use in the state of the institution for 18 to 25-year-olds. An arrest-per-capita metric was also applied, weighing the number of drug-related arrests on campus against student population.
UMaine Director of Alcohol and Drug Education Programs Lauri Sidelko said she put little stock into the results of the list, but said the university always takes accusations like this seriously.
“This is the business that I work in and we’re nowhere near the biggest, ‘druggiest’ campus in the nation,” she said. “From what I’ve gathered, they’ve been looking at 18-24-year-old data in our state, which is much different than college students.”
According to the website, “The College Prowler grades were assigned a numerical value according to the letter grade assigned, which was weighted one-third of each school’s final score; the arrests-per-capita rank and drug use ranks were also ranked one-third of the final rank.”
On College Prowler, the University of Maine’s “drug scene” grade is a C.
“Most of the drugs pushed around on UMaine’s campus outside of marijuana are prescription medications,” the site reads. “The campus is very strict about drugs when they find them, and if you have enough drugs or enough people participating, the media attention you will get from that type of behavior will make you feel like a movie star.”
Sidelko said she does not typically see prescription drug users in her office — alcohol and marijuana offenses are, by far, the most common.
“In terms of prescription drug use, we do a lot of education,” she said. “I don’t see it as something that is a big problem on campus. … Our prescription numbers have never been beyond any kind of national standard nor have they been higher than any other school in our region.”
Robert Dana, vice president for student affairs and dean of students also disagreed with The Daily Beast’s findings, saying the rankings were unscientific and calling the whole thing a publicity stunt for the website.
“It’s tremendously irresponsible,” Dana said. “It bears no resemblance to science. It’s really a hellacious effort to pour gasoline on an issue and blow it up … to drive people to their website.”
Dana said the information compiled to come up with the rankings was incorrect. He said 67 marijuana violations were cited as a determining factor in ranking UMaine and were labeled as arrests. None of those 67 violations resulted in an arrest, Dana said. Rather, the violators were sent to Judicial Affairs on campus and no formal legal action was taken.
“You cannot paint a picture with these numbers,” said Dana.
“I think students will tell you that, sure, on every campus you’ll see some illicit behaviors, but it’s probably very, very obvious that you don’t have a lot of opiate-addicted individuals. You don’t have a lot of cocaine-dazed individuals,” Dana said. “What you have here is a campus community that takes very seriously the corrosive effects of drug abuse.”
Dana’s objections to the manner in which the information was compiled are shared by Guy Cousins, director of the Maine Office of Substance Abuse.
“When someone takes apples from one place, oranges from another and bananas from another, I’m not sure you can really come up with any sort of a conclusion,” Cousins said.
Cousins cited the vagueness of The Daily Beast’s definitions of drug use as a red flag. Combining unrelated information from three different sources led to ambiguity in the final product, he said.
“It talks about ‘percentage of 18-25 statewide using drugs regularly,’ so I have no idea what they’re talking about when they’re talking about ‘regularly,’” said Cousins. “Are they talking about daily, talking about four times a week, you know?”
Cousins discounted the idea that any one Maine college or university faces different issues regarding drugs and alcohol than another.
“I think Orono faces the same issues that other universities face,” he said. “We have a large population of people coming out of family situations where they’re now in a new environment, new people, less structure and supervised activities where they have to make some adult decisions.”
The University of New Hampshire was No. 1 on the list, followed in order by Northeastern University in Boston and Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I. The University of Vermont was ranked 18th.
