Texas State goes up in smoke
Want to score some dope? See you in San Marcos
Everyone knows that college campuses are the best places to score drugs, but which schools really stick out?
The Daily Beast recently put U.S. institutions of higher learning to the test. Locals may be surprised to learn that only one Texas school — Texas State — made the cut. It left those of us who've experienced LSD in ATX, heightened states within Rice's hedges or taken advantage of the cornucopia of drugs abutting UH in the Third Ward, well, a little shaken.
"The percentage of students that smoke marijuana or use other illegal drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, doubled from 1993 to 2005," reports the Beast.
Where do Houston colleges fit in? To cast the rankings, the publication combined statistics from College Prowler, the largest student review database, and studied the surrounding environment according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' 2009 National Survey on Drug Abuse. The U.S. Department of Education's data for the number of on-campus arrests for 2009 drug-law violations was also taken into account.
There are the standard stoner schools like University of New Hampshire (#1) and University of Oregon (#12). Otherwise, the study seems to lean on two sides of the spectrum.
There are those schools that pack in trustafarians with the funds to acquire plentiful grams of what have you (Vanderbilt, #28, Williams, #10 and Hampshire, #50). And then there are the big state school party palaces like University of Colorado Boulder (#6), Florida State (#21) and Penn State (#27). There are also those rural public colleges such as West Virginia University (#9) that most likely offer little else in activities besides cow-tipping and crystal meth. Essentially every college in California also qualified for the top 50 list.
Texas State in San Marcos earned a coveted spot at 35 with a drug use grade of "C+." Among its 30,803 student population, 144 were arrested on-campus for drug law violations. The ranking was oddly based on statewide data, meaning that Texas State students are just as likely as any other 18-25 year-old Texan to use marijuana regularly (20.13 percent) and consistently indulge in cocaine (5.08 percent).
What we're most curious about is what drug the Beast was on when it came up with the word, "druggiest"?