A new marijuana outreach program and updates on the alcohol-safety resolution presented to City Council were the main topics at the April 6 meeting of the A-Team.
The A-Team is a coalition of various UW and Laramie organizations, including but not limited to, the Wellness Center, ASUW and the police departments of both campus and the community—brought together by AWARE (Alcohol Wellness Alternatives, Research, & Education), which itself is part of UW’s counseling center. While the A-Team’s focus is primarily on reducing underage or unsafe drinking practices, the growing normalization of marijuana use has prompted new approaches to the issue of its use by some students.
“As we continue conversations nationally about legalization, we see that more people are curious about its effects—overall, wanting to have more knowledge about it,” AWARE Program Coordinator and A-Team Chair Monica Keele said. “Because we do harm-reduction outreach with alcohol, how can we maybe translate that over into a marijuana outreach?”
The bulk of Friday’s meeting was reserved for a presentation of, and initial feedback for, the new outreach program in its infant stage—created using data from survey samples of UW students of all backgrounds that included users and non-users.
Graduate Assistant with AWARE and Ph.D. candidate in UW’s Psychology program Tess Kilwein took the helm of the new program’s initial research—falling in line with her focus on marijuana-related work for AWARE.
“It started with the focus groups last year and just getting some information from our students about what kind of education did they want to see on campus, do they want to see it at all and then based on that, we’re writing up a publication and using some of this feedback,” Kilwein said. “We got support really from both ends—from the people that do want to use or are using, how to maybe do it in [a] safe way that doesn’t lead to problematic use.”
During the presentation, harmful effects of marijuana use were discussed—particularly those most significant when seeking success in a higher-education environment. The potential harm from single or ongoing use and how to reduce it will serve as the program’s focus and is the main motivation in reaching out to students.
“Harm reduction is probably the best method to talk about marijuana, so that’s where we started with the program,” Keele said. “How can we talk about this in a way that’s not fear-based? Because we know that doesn’t work. People are still going to experiment, they’re still going to use—how can they do it in a safer manner to hopefully reduce those negative consequences?”
A major focus of the program is on the debunking of various myths about marijuana, such as those regarding its safety compared to alcohol, non-addictive properties or health effects.
“One of the most common and prevalent myths that you hear is, ‘weed makes you a safer driver, it doesn’t affect you like alcohol,’ which is not the case,” Keele said. “As we see more research coming out of a few different universities doing driver simulations, we see that the facts of intoxication with marijuana are very similar to alcohol. People don’t stay within their lanes, their reaction times becomes doubled when things jump out in front of them. When we look at DWI data, a lot of times the reason they’re being pulled over is because they’ve made a traffic mistake.”
The next step for the outreach program includes additional preview presentations before specific student groups before opening it up for presentations to the general campus community on a by-request basis.
The meeting concluded with an update on the resolution presented to the Laramie City Council during its previous working meeting, at which a public forum was open for the renewal of local liquor licenses. The resolution contained public data examined from a perspective that saw a link between a few specific liquor-serving establishments in Laramie that were named as the last point of consumption by individuals cited for alcohol-related incidents.
“It seems that the data really resonated with them, they seemed to be pretty concerned about it to a point where they are planning to do a separate work session to figure out development of a safety program, or something like that, hopefully engaging in a conversation with these particular establishments and to figure out a solution for how to reduce those numbers,” Keele said.
