For the fifth time in four years, students at SUNY New Paltz will protest outside the Haggerty Administration building calling for an end to illegal searches on and around the campus.

The issue is a perennial for the student body, the student government, and the campus chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, which has organized a number of actions and meetings with administrators on this issue over the past decade.

Despite every lawyer and public official in three counties continually coming to the aid of the students, the SUNY Administration has refused to budge and has never been made to defend the searches – or its insane drug policy – in a public forum.

The underlying issue, of course, has little or perhaps nothing to do with the campus police, who have increasingly drawn the ire of the student movement of late, but rather with campus policies, most notably the bizarre and uniquely draconian drug policy and the outrageously lax interpretation of the SUNY Administration’s responsibilities in the student handbook.

On the first:  SUNY New Paltz has, by far, the most draconian drug policy in the entire SUNY system.  Students found to be in possession of a single psilocybin mushroom, for example, are immediately expelled – presumably even if the specimen is one of the many that grow wild on campus.  Students found to be in possession of marijuana on more than one occasion are also expelled.  No other SUNY school mandates expulsions for first or second time possession offenses.

SUNY New Paltz has a long and uninterrupted tradition of beautiful and responsible use of psychedelic materials, and fortunately this policy has done little to change that.  It has, however, ruined the lives of a few individual students each year.

The more pressing issue, however, is clearly the behavior of high level administrators vis a vis the judicial procedure.  Two years ago, several top administratiors were caught red handed breaking a number of campus rules and state laws in an effort to silence three student leaders, this blogger included.  (They even went so far as to claim, during a boustrous protest in February, that they were essentially not bound at all by their own rules!)

Despite outcry from the usual suspects and a season-long tirade of news coverage, the disgraced administrators in question continue to hope that everyone will forget and let the cycle begin again.

The fact that this is out in the open and the subject of a current lawsuit is the only element making this current protest and movement unique from the others, and it stands to reason that if the students and faculty are able to learn from the past and continue asking the probing questions about these past two years, they may finally get some relief.

The protest is on Wednesday at – ahem – 4:20PM.  I’ll be there.

The facebook event for the protest is here:

http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=36187323342