Drug group loses national charter

Jennifer Knight

Tuesday, April 29, 2003 | 8:47 a.m.

Wow, man. Bummer.

A University of Nevada, Las Vegas, student group that promotes drug awareness with cartoon illustrations showing "how to roll a joint" went through the ultimate "buzz-kill" upon learning that its parent organization has suspended its charter.

Leaders of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a Washington-based organization with chapters at 200 high school and college campuses, said the local chapter's affiliation was pulled last week because its take on the drug awareness program was a bit hazy.

"On our mission statement it says that SSDP does not endorse illegal drug use," said Darrell Rogers, the group's national outreach coordinator. "The materials used by (UNLV's chapter) included things like how to roll a joint and other cartoons depicting people wearing shirts with the SSDP logo and smoking a joint."

The group promotes safe drug use through education and condemns the war on drugs, but the UNLV chapter took that message further through heavy use of pot-themed rhetoric on its website and T-shirts.

Local chapter representatives said they wanted to "demystify" pot use, but those at the national office said their actions left the organization open to a lawsuit.

"What it comes back to is that it is leaving ourselves very vulnerable to people who don't like us," Rogers said.

Jenn Gross, former president of the group's UNLV chapter, said the local group wanted marijuana to be legalized.

"The thing is, we are really focused on ending the war on drugs, and in the grand scheme of things, we would like to legalize marijuana," Gross said. "That's why we put the marijuana leaf on pretty much everything we distribute."

One comic posted on the chapter's website, freshpoop.com, shows a dog with his face buried in a bowl of food, surrounded by plume of smoke. The balloon above his head reads, "Evidence that 'the munchies' are not exclusive to humans."

Another comic shows a spike-haired joint smoker sporting an SSDP shirt saying that marijuana is a gateway drug -- a gateway to "new ways of thinking," that is.

Rogers said those images were too radical for the national group's liking.

"We're trying to build credibility in the movement," Rogers said. "There is kind of this image that we like to project."

Local organizers called the national group's condemnation of their actions hypocritical. While the UNLV group sold T-shirts with images of the marijuana leaf on it, the national arm sells T-shirts depicting President Bush hunched over a large pile of cocaine and snorting it.

"It's so hypocritical,"said Lewis Whitten, 36, a economics student at UNLV who is taking the semester off. "They won't put any pot leaves on anything, but they will put a picture of the president doing a line of cocaine. When I look at that I think, 'Snort cocaine and maybe you can be president too.' "

Rogers claims the two cases are entirely different.

"Our depiction of a political figure with a curious history is us pointing the finger at the drug war," Rogers said. "The big difference (with the UNLV group) is that it was us. It showed SSPD using drugs."

The charter suspension could result in the loss of $500 in student government money because the group is now disbanded, Whitten said.

Monica Moradkhan, UNLV's student body president, said she is trying to preserve funding for the group.

"I don't think they should lose their funding just because they lost their national (accreditation)," Moradkhan said. "They are still a recognized student organization."

The group is still linked to UNLV's main website, even though the national organization says it has backed away from any legal liability that could come as a result of the chapter's pro-drug stance.

Whitten has already regrouped. He is busy building support for his new group, called Nevadans for Unrestricted Gardens, which he said has about 10 to 15 members so far.

Whitten said the new group's goal is to introduce an initiative in Las Vegas that would make it legal to grow cannabis plants -- for their flowers.