When Paul Blasenheim ’12 tells people he is a drug policy activist, people assume that he “just wants to make smoking weed easier.” To many, drug activism means student-hippies fighting for easier access to another fix. The movement, however, deals with much more than just legalizing pot—activists are setting their sights on complex issues of race, class, and socio-economic inequality, while struggling to be taken seriously.

At the center of drug activism at Wesleyan is Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP). Blasenheim founded the second incarnation of this group at Wesleyan in the fall of 2009, but an earlier chapter of this organization existed at Wesleyan in the early 2000s.

“SSDP supports ending the war on drugs,” Blasenheim said. “What that means is trying to find more compassionate alternatives to the system of prohibition, which we see as being a racially motivated and discriminatory policy that targets disadvantaged communities. This means maneuvering drugs from a question of criminal justice to a question of public health”

Blasenheim said SSDP isconcerned with the consequences of turning drugs into a criminal issue.

“The ramifications of prohibition have been a massive prison system, a massive policing system, a ridiculously militarized border zone, and obscene violence generally directed at the poor, who are already the victims of economic systems,” he said. “The longer we have prohibition, the less we understand about what drug use really is, because all of our money goes into cops and courts and prisons, and not into things like medical research and sociological studies about what prompts the use of drugs.”

In the past, drug activism groups at the University focused more narrowly on the legalization of marijuana. It was only in the early 2000s, with the founding of the original SSDP group, that students became more organized around the broader implications of drug prohibition. A University alumnus who participated in this group, who preferred to remain anonymous, described how this change took place.

“Originally there was The Can (Wesleyan Cannabis Coalition), which was really just a bunch of kinds focused on marijuana issues,” the alumnus said. “Then the SSDP got started, and people who were involved in The Can really just got folded into our group, because it was a national organization with a broader mission of reducing harm rather than just legalizing marijuana.”

At the time of its conception, the SSDP was mainly preoccupied with question 28 on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form. This question was the result of the Higher Education Act of 1998 (HEA) and demanded students divulge if they had been convicted of a drug offense within the last year. Any student who answered “yes” was automatically denied federal aid.

“In the early 2000s, the goals of SSDP were still to be written,” Blasenheim said. “What really rallied students was the financial aid issue because that seemed like the intersection between student youth and the drug war.”

In 2006, students from the former chapter of the SSDP attended the New England College Conference in Manchester, N.H., where they questioned presidential candidates on their positions concerning the Higher Education Act.

“We pretty much got every Democratic presidential candidate to support the repeal of the drug provision of the HEA, which is a pretty amazing task,” Zakia Henderson-Brown ’06 said of the event in a 2004 issue of The Argus. “And it only happened because of the great strategic techniques from SSDP National.”

Recently, two bills in the Connecticut state legislature have forced the SSDP to return to the issue of marijuana legalization. The first, An Act Concerning the Palliative Use of Marijuana, deals with the legalization of medical marijuana. The second, An Act Concerning Nonviolent Drug Possession, would reduce the penalty for possessing under an ounce of marijuana to the level of a minor infraction.

“The SSDP has been doing call-your-legislator campaigns, and we’ve also brought a number of people who are integral to the legislation to speak here,” Blasenheim said. “By paying them to come, we’re also giving them money which goes to support the movement in general. So we’ve sort of found a way to use the ‘academy’ as a useful resource for groups that are trying to do this type of work.”

Blasenheim further discussed how the group is trying to connect these broader events happening in Connecticut with the University community.

“I and some of the other people in SSDP are planning to go to the WSA [Wesleyan Student Assembly] in the event that this medical marijuana law gets passed and ask that its policy against smoking indoors be reexamined, because it is likely that there will be people on this campus who qualify for medical marijuana use,” he said. “It’s going to be interesting to see how Wesleyan as an institution responds to this change in policy.”

Blasenheim said these issues are still relevant to University students.

“We’re such a privileged campus, so sometimes it can seem like who the hell are we, we’re not the victims of this kind of thing,” he said. “But then you see that racial profiling still goes on by Public Safety and others, or you walk five blocks into Middletown and see that marijuana arrests are still happening there all the time.”

The SSDP was created to deal with these tensions.

“We have to ask ourselves, how do we engage with our own privilege, and how do we try to be in solidarity with people who are much more targeted by policing than we are?” he said. “It just raises all these interesting questions that I have no answers to, but that compel us to do really interesting and diverse work.”