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White House Drug-Control Strategy Focuses on College Students

July 11, 2011, 6:54 pm

The Obama administration’s 2011 National Drug Control Strategy, a report released today, for the first time includes a focus on college students for substance-abuse prevention efforts. “Drug addiction is a disease that too often begins—and can be prevented—on campus,” R. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said in a news release. In particular, the report urges college health officials to ask students about substance use during regular visits, provide medical advice, and refer some students to treatment programs. More than one in five students who drop out of college may do so for reasons related to alcohol, it says. “Substance abuse keeps students from reaching their full academic potential,” Mr. Kerlikowske said.

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  • drnels

    I think one of the things we should do is teach collaborative writing.  Now, that’s easy for me to say since we have a collaborative writing course that pushes students to think of these exact issues.  Much writing students will do on the job is collaborative and will be presented with the company as the author, not the actual writer (one reason I teach Foucault’s “What is an Author?” so students can start thinking about the distinction).  I do think students need practice being writers and not authors as well as authors and not writers.

  • bghansel

    To continue on the theme of Nels Highberg, I learned to let go of the ownership of my drafts when I had to write for someone else. Since I was trying to express HIS thoughts and HIS vision rather than mine, I was much less attached to the product I wrote. I took it calmly when he proposed a complete reorganization of the text. (And, yes, the end result was better than my earlier draft.) What worked well is that he obviously liked and respected my writing and I respected and trusted his vision for the organization. Any exercise that might have students practice writing for each other would be worth a try.

  • changinggears

    One thing I do to encourage both ownership and collaboration is to have the author of a piece assess it’s strengths and weaknesses before presenting it for peer feedback.  Then, based on their assessment, the writer asks their peers to focus their feedback on specific aspects of the piece. Once the student has revised the piece, I ask them to select one change they made and explain what they changed and why (was it because of peer feedback or a decision they made themselves?) and to reflect on the peer feedback that they found most useful.  The student then publishes the piece to a class blog, where other students who are not peer reviewers of the piece can read it and comment on it.  My hope is that having others comment on the “finished” piece will help students see the value in asking for and receiving feedback before going public with a piece of writing, much like the writing process they will need to use in the workplace.

    One of the hardest things for my freshman to do is to view their own writing objectively.  If I can teach them how to do that, I feel I’ve really accomplished something.  I think peer review helps them to do so, if they’re receptive to it.  It’s that receptivity and the skill to provide useful feedback and the ability to differentiate good feedback from poor feedback that are so hard to teach. 

  • missoularedhead

    I agree. One of the ways I have students do this is by building wikis as a group. There are required elements, but how they write it, who writes it, who edits it, etc., is up to the group. In this way, each group member can play to his or her strengths while learning from others. One student may have an excellent design for layout, while another has the ability to edit for grammar, but they both learn something from each other.  I also think there’s a different sense of pride of ownership when collaborating.

  • dmtedards

    This article makes a useful distinction between individually authored papers and truly collaborative projects and how the peer review/editing process can and should be handled differently…so that
    ownership and authority over one’s own writing remains intact.

  • kosboot

    I once came up with a 15-week lesson plan entirely devoted to engaging Wikipedia.  Students would have to read about discourse, argumentation, observe, then edit Wikipedia articles and engage in back-and-forth with Wikipedians, eventually creating their own articles and then engaging with the many people who would start editing their entries.  In so doing they would learn the various rules governing online Wikipedian relationships and knowledge exchange.

  • drnels

    I do something similar in my Professional Editing course.  Students are always stunned when they make a change to what they feel is some obscure article, and then ten other people engage with it positively and negatively within a day.  Wikipedia becomes an amazing teaching tool when it comes to these issues.

  • http://twitter.com/dighist IiDH

    Against Collaboration, imagining cooperative interactivity and the democratic digital humanities, http://wp.me/p1noGP-4o

  • rawhideacademics

    I love the picture selected for this article because it speaks to how basic our instincts are when it comes to writing, sharing, receiving, and owning something that is important.  That is, I’m growing in my faith that we mostly function at the primal region of our brains (a la “Self Comes to Mind” and other cognitive studies work), so that whether it is my writing process or the work of teaching writing, one must attend to the most basic of instincts.  I interpret the research of Blau and Caspi in this vein.  I smiled at my screen when reading that most people feel their edits help the other writer but most people don’t feel other people’s edits helped them.  I get a sense of a group of primal brains benefitting from collaboration but narrating that collaboration to themselves as an exercise of their ingenuity.  (Reminds me of the contemporary political scene.) 

    Returning to the picture, one of the elements I see is that the “receiving” child is tentative about the potentially pushy way that a gift is being offered.  I think gender even comes into this moment of give and receive in my classrooms for which giving advice seems to come very easily for my most accomplished female students whereas receiving such advice comes with greatest resistance from male students.  

  • Guest

    The Obama administration should not have a National Drug Control Strategy. Executive overreach. Nanny state. Loss of focus. Wasteful spending. Let’s move on.

  • katisumas

    Your rightwing buddies are the ones who started this failed war on drugs.  They would be vociferous if an administration, any administration, tried to change it.  Look what happened in California when legalizing pot was put to the voters.

    At least the Obama administration is respecting states’ rights by not interfering with the several states’ laws allowing marijuana for medical reasons, unlike the Bush Jr. policies when the feds kept on raiding medical pot dispensaries….  The Bush people reversed the Clinton’s policies of respecting states’ rights to admit the medical use of marijuana.

    Furthermore, your rightwing accomplices are, and are succeeding in several states, trying to dictate what is happening inside my body (my womb), are getting in between my doctor and myself, and are mounting an offensive against all form of birth control (except the rythm method that is notoriously unreliable), as well as preventive (you know cancer, etc) gynecological care for women lacking in health insurance (an ever growing segment of the middle class).

    And then, once a baby is actually here, actually living outside of his/her mother, your rightwing buddies immediately classify that infant as a “freeloader” and are working at eliminating all programs that would help babies and children with health care, nutrition and education.

    Unlike so many Americans suffering from acute historical (hysterical?) amnesia, I happen to remember what the extreme right (Nazis) did in the recent past (you know, 1930s onward….) and what present hate filled discourse portends for the future (in Nazi Germany too, abortion was illegal and “vigorous reproduction” was promoted….

    Anyway, I’m aware you’re a troll and I am arguing with your imaginary self only to keep my retired brain working….

  • gohito

    I don’t see how Robert Oscar Lopez can be labeled rightwing. Is it because he criticized Obama? I am extremely liberal and agree with Lopez’s assessment. I would think this if Bush were president or Obama. I didn’t like the Obama administration coming out against medical marijuana either. Obama is looking more and more like a conservative republican all the time. The government needs to get out of people’s private lives period.

  • goxewu

    If the phrase “nanny state” doesn’t confirm it, try looking up Prof. Lopez’s other comments on CHE threads, or the blog “The Colorful Conservative.” For a little surprise, though, look at what coco_rico has to say about sexuality.

     

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Antsy-Kuhnwisse/100002159499682 Antsy Kuhnwisse

    Quite right about Prof. Lopez, but some liberals (me for one) do have problems with the extent and reach of nanny-stateism.

    Food and drug labeling: great.  Love to see more of it.  Food restrictions or proscriptions for individuals and private restaurants?  Too far.

    Social services intervention in abusive parenting situations?  Necessary (and practiced too infrequently).  Arresting parents for allowing their kids to go out or stay at home without adult supervision?  Harmful and intrusive.

    Social security deducted from paychecks?  I guess I’d consider an opt-out provision — perhaps requiring a session with an economic counselor first!  But helmet laws?  Seat belt laws?  And yes, even child restraint laws (by which, at my height and weight, I should have sat in a booster seat up to the age of 19, and will probably qualify again soon, once I shrink an inch): way too extreme.

    And as for Obama’s “drug control strategy” with students, I find it silly, and unlikely to be effective in reducing substance abuse.  (But it’s certainly better and less destructive than a “crackdown” approach.)

    I think many liberals are on the same page with libertarians in terms of rejecting government-imposed protection of their safety, and wanting the freedom to choose the risks they are willing to take with themselves.

  • goxewu

    Helmet, seatbelt, and child restraint laws:

    * As we learned in my Model T days, in high school driver’s ed, driving isn’t a right, but a privilege. You have to pass some tests and get a license to do it. (You don’t have to do those things to walk or take public transport.) And once you’re licensed to do it, you have to obey certain rules, among which are seatbelt and child-restraint rules.

    * Perhaps if there were a way for seatbelt and helmet non-users to have evidence of some sort of waiver on them (tattoo, implant?) when they drove, then first responders could leave them be and bleed while they tended to people who did obey the rules, then blanket enforcement of seatbelt and helmet laws might conceivably considered intrusive.

    * At a motorcycle riders’ protest against helmet laws in upstate New York recently, one of the protesters had to stop short, and was flipped over his handlebars. He landed on his head and died in the hospital. State police said that had the man been wearing a helmet, he wouldn’t have been killed. http://abcnews.go.com/US/york-rider-dies-protesting-motorcycle-helmet-law/story?id=13993417

    * “…at my height and weight, I should have sat in a booster seat up to the
    age of 19, and will probably qualify again soon, once I shrink an inch.”

    I seriously doubt whether a cop would ever ticket an adult Antsy Kuhnwisse for either driving, or being a passenger in, a car without being in a child restraint device. Too bad about not being allowed on rollercoasters, though.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Antsy-Kuhnwisse/100002159499682 Antsy Kuhnwisse

    To gox (whose message was too embedded to permit a direct reply): Thanks for the sympathy, pal — it’s not *all* bad.

    But merely stating how things *are* is not the same as arguing that that’s the way they should be.  Reasonable people can disagree about the proper extent of regulations.

    I might go along with a “waiver of medical treatment” indicator for non-helmet/seatbelt wearers.  Then, at least, the driver/passengers would have a choice.

    The fact that cops would probably ignore height and weight requirements in *my* case for being in a moving vehicle without a booster seat is a clear indication to me that something is wrong with the law.  (Actually, there IS an age limit to the law, but that, too, reveals the wrongness of the law — if this extra protection is truly necessary for people under a certain height or weight, why shouldn’t *everyone* under that height or weight be required to be protected?)

    Besides, a great many parents don’t seem to be able to secure the (expensive!) infant and child safety seats correctly, rendering them essentially useless anyway.

    Most respectfully disagreeing,
    Antsy

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