Mom2and, you may not be familiar, but Im hardly the only one to ( including Harvard et.al) advocate for young adults to consider stopping out of the classroom slog from k through college.
http://www.americangap.org/news.php
This age is naturally sensation seeking. They are hard wired that way.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2011/10/teenage-brains/dobbs-text
The “bad batch” comment does not imply safety or endorsement of the behavior. It is simply an explanation of why a cluster of kids who all got the drugs from the same place would suddenly have the same type of emergency situation. It also highlights the Russian roulette nature of these drugs. As was brought up earlier, one wonders why a kid who might be vegetarian or vegan or gluten free or what have you would be willing to put something so completely unknown into their body.
I saw a post on a friend’s fb timeline from her daughter who was a senior in high school…granted she was young but it was in response to people od’ing on Molly a few years ago. She was suggesting that you should be careful who you get your Molly from…as if there was some better than others.
Oddly, this friend has a daughter who has struggled with her her ion addiction for a long time.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the kids arrested here had similar pasts in high school. Not saying they did but that kind of behavior (easy money/lax attitude/connections) transfers.
RenaissanceMom, It rattles my cage, too. I am unhappy enough about the prevailing lax attitude toward pot. This is so much worse.
DS and I visited Wesleyan last week, and we both fell in love. I’d been thinking that if it looks like he’d have a decent chance of admission we’d try applying early. DS had been apprehensive about going to college, talking about taking a gap year. I’d been dreading the prospect of his going away. After our visit, we both felt much better. DS was excited about the possibility of going there, and I was starting to feel better about his going away if he ended up at a place like Wesleyan.
I also liked the fact that virtually all students live on campus, in different kinds of housing. I thought that this was safer than having kids in off-campus locations.
We loved it for a number of reasons, but among them were the warmth, enthusiasm, and general niceness of the students we encountered and the tolerant attitude - I was thinking about tolerance to all kinds of “differences,” but apparently it extends to drug abuse, as well. Of course I know that there are kids drinking and using drugs on all campuses, but I’m thinking now that Wesleyan may be particularly bad in this regard. I read somewhere that 1 in 13 Wesleyan students had been caught with drugs. I’m sure that not everyone was caught. This seems like a very high rate to me.
And if the charges against the 4 students are true, they were dealing lots of drugs from their dorm rooms! This couldn’t happen without a “look-the-other-way” attitude from the administration. And I’m also wondering why they were caught with drugs at all. The female student supposedly had a large quantity of something other than Molly. They had several days to flush the stuff down the toilets or otherwise dispose of it. I read that none of them had Molly in their possession, so maybe they did get rid of that. But keeping the other drugs shows that they felt entitled to have and sell drugs in the dorms.
RenaissanceMom, I spend a lot of time talking to DS about drugs, too. Some of his friends smoke pot, or use vaporizers, and there are kids on the street around his school smoking in the mornings. This is some of the information that I’ve found useful, from the NIH/NIDA site
http://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/directors-page
And here is a video of Nora Volkow, director of NIDA, presenting the data to an audience that seems to be composed of addiction workers:
http://forum.cadca.org/?q=node/550
Unfortunately, they keep the camera on her face and do not show her slides. There is a link to download the presentation, but it’s password protected.
Wesleyan has similarities to Brown, right?
Is Brown a lot harder to get into?
Brown is completely different to Wesleyan University, for a start only the very best students attend, they may be somewhat allowing to students but not to the extent Wesleyan do at Wesleyan drug use is rife far more than most other colleges.
After visiting Wesleyan and seeing it, we completely changed our minds to our ds attending, fortunately he was admitted elsewhere.
I expect even going test optional this year, Wesleyan will see a drop in applications this year and more likely a higher drop in yield (students deciding to attend), last year they admitted about 24%, I suspect their rankings will fall and admittance will increase to over 25% of applicants.
@NYMomof2 I strongly suggest you consider all options and choices, have you visited Vassar?
I don’t think Brown and Wes are “that” different in terms of the students who apply. At least at my offspring’s high school alma mater, there’s a lot of overlap in applications among non-STEM kids. There is a lot of drug use at Brown and there has been since the 60s. However, it’s mostly pot and a lot less of anything else.And, there are a lot of kids, in fact a slight majority, who don’t use any drugs. If you wonder how I can claim to know… well…here’s one of my sources. http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/04/17/white-older-students-more-likely-to-use-substances/
This isn’t scientific. It’s a poll by the campus paper. However, it takes them pretty regularly and personally I think the results are pretty accurate.
Brown is significantly harder to get into than Wes, especially for STEM types. I think the real difference between Wes and Brown is the strength of Brown in the sciences. I’m not saying Wes isn’t good–it is. However, biological sciences in particular are one of Brown’s great areas of strength. Computer science is also excellent at Brown.
At most colleges, the artsy types tend to indulge more than the scientists, which is why I was surprised that 3 of the accused in the Wes case are neuroscience majors.
What shocks me is that 26% of Brown students smoke tobacco!
Yep, that’s disgusting, isn’t it?
Every college has kids that use drugs.
Every college has “that guy” who is known to be the guy that can hook you up.
Any parent of a kid between 15 and 25 years of age should be holding their breath that their kid makes it through these years.
They are young. They feel invincible. They believe nothing bad will happen to them. They text when they drive, they speed in their cars, they drive after drinking. They try drugs. They have unprotected sex. They binge drink, they take pills like Adderall to help them study that they got off a friend of a friend…
You can talk to you are blue in the face, you can educate them, you can send them articles to read, you can threaten them, you can watch them like a hawk. They will still experiment with behaviors that we all know are dangerous.
They can be athletes or artsy kids. They can be leaders or followers, they can be boys or girls.
It can be your kid. Yes, your perfect kid who you know knows better and has sworn to you that they are doing none of this. It can be your kid.
So when this stuff happens just be glad it wasn’t your son or daughter …this time. Don’t presume it was inadequate parenting or troubled kids.
Hug them, tell them you love them. Because this can be anyones kid…even yours.
Any college, any school …anywhere.
jonri, Wesleyan is a good place for kids in the sciences. They get a lot of NIH/NSF funding, there are only 300 grad students, so there are lots of opportunities for undergrads to do research, and quite a few of them have their names on peer-reviewed publications before they graduate.
Englishman, we did visit Vassar and for some reason it left us both cold, although I can see all the great things about it. I’ve learned since then that DS would have a reasonable chance of admission because the rates are much higher for males, so it may end up on the list. I’m curious about what you noticed about Wesleyan that you didn’t like when you visited? I’m reading things about it now that I don’t like, but when DS and I were there we loved it.
DS doesn’t have a chance at Brown, and he may not have a chance at Wesleyan. I haven’t had a chance to look at Naviance for Wesleyan yet.
I agree, sax, that most of us have no guarantees on our kids’ behavior. This is the reason that some of us think that it’s very important to find a school that doesn’t have a pervasive drug/alcohol culture. A kid who could go either way is much less likely to try something if everyone around him is doing it and, even if he doesn’t, it isn’t pleasant to be in that kind of atmosphere if you don’t participate.
I started a thread on a closely related topic a while ago: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1667582-how-to-find-colleges-without-partying-atmosphere-and-with-predominantly-serious-students-p1.html
@NYMomof2 Before we visited we liked the CSS program, the University location in CT and the fact that no-one from our state really applies. During our visit we hated the location and were really disappointed that CSS was too structured and some of the profs were not that friendly. We really did not like the attitude some of the students showed during the student panel at Wesfest (attitude sucked, and the aggression was unsettling), we were let down by the housing both dorms and upperclassman housing and really how many times can you talk about HIMYM and Carter Bays is that their only ‘claim to fame’?. Pres Roth was insightful and fun, but I wonder how much longer will he stay at Wes and finally I find people like @Circuitrider a constant Wes promoter, even of things for which Wes gets called out for that he spins as a positive, it just doesn’t work. See Wes slide continue, look elsewhere, this is just another more recent horrid occurance in an environment which is not conducive to advancing the school.
There is a photo of Kramer with his parents in this article:
There but for the grace of God, etc. They look shell-shocked. And devastated. I feel awful for them. According to the article, their son was carrying a 4.0 average and was hoping to go to medical school.
The article also reports the prosecutor’s claims in the charging document. According to this, the students (at least, 3 of them) had huge quantities of drugs in their dorm rooms. It also says that the police started investigating Sunday morning and the students were arrested Tuesday night. Didn’t they think their rooms would be searched? Why did they keep the stuff?
They must be SOOooooo proud.
I agree, NYMom. I feel for the shell-shocked parents and wonder why the kids didn’t get move the drugs out of their rooms. I guess they thought the no-snitch culture would protect them. I’m glad it didn’t. Such arrogance. Good for those Wesleyan kids who came forward.
“They look shell-shocked. And devastated. I feel awful for them.” – me three.
My husband worked for a short period at Trinity College, where a few kids overdosed on heroin, one fatally. The kids who were OK were all expelled from TC. Some were seniors, one semester from graduation. There went their – very expensive! – undergraduate education.
The only thing worse would be to be the parent of one of the kids in intensive care.
I am sure they are devastated. Any of us would be, and sadly, I know parents that have dealt with their children’s addictions.