Editiorial from this week's Critic:

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"Since the beginning of last year, Critic has seen Campus Watch staff pay a greater amount of attention to the 4.20 meetings, where students gather to smoke cannabis and protest the drug’s prohibition. We’ve heard claims from NORML Otago that Campus Watch members have harassed and intimidated them. We’ve heard characteristically restrained University responses to the issue, either refusing to comment or drip-feeding to the media rather vague responses about not tolerating illegal activities and meeting such activities with a police response.

What we hadn’t seen, until last week, was an actual police response. This came in the form of the Campus Cop apparently arresting a student at the behest of a Campus Watch staff member, which inevitably prompted a protest against almost every authority figure involved in the whole mess.

Yes, many of the students present at the protest seemed self-conscious and more there to observe than to take part, most of the chants didn’t take off, and despite the murmuring about hotboxing the Proctor’s office, nothing really eventuated. Yes, police (and Campus Watch) were present but entirely benign, apparently content to let people smoke cannabis as they marched from the Union Lawn to the St David theatre complex and milled around aimlessly outside the Proctor’s office. But the protest did show that OUSA and those students present would not support the University cracking down on cannabis use on campus, particularly if the Campus Cop was to be involved. And it showed that the issue won’t go away, even if the Proctor did.

Chants for Simon Thompson to come down from his first-floor office and address the crowd weren’t officially answered, and while we saw Thompson leave his office, he didn’t appear in front of the crowd. (The ODT later wrote that he made a hasty exit through a back door.) The protestors then focused their attention on two uniformed police officers standing impassively at the end of Castle St. Speeches and more haphazard chanting followed, and the crowd dispersed without incident.

When the Campus Watch were established following the 2006 Castle St ‘riots’, student leaders were initially told that they would not be replacing the Campus Security staff at all. This, in fact, happened last year. But just last week there seemed to be a new policy in place, as a Campus Watch member seems to have got it into his head that the Campus Cop should start arresting students smoking cannabis on campus. (Incidentally, when the Campus Cop position was established, student leaders were promised – specifically – that the role would not be used to target marijuana smokers on campus. Just see where that got us.) I suspect that University policy about the Campus Watch had always been to slowly increase the pressure, the rhetoric, and the Watch’s on-campus presence over a number of years. That way, they might have assumed, students would slowly accept having them around, and perhaps not notice, or remember, these prior assurances.

Anyone within spitting distance of the Clocktower will have heard the line about the University not tolerating illegal activities on campus. Now that NORML Otago, with the blessing of OUSA, have been provoking the University twice a week and protesting against any slight, perceived or otherwise, national media coverage has ramped up. The University may now find itself in a difficult position, forced either to make the unpopular decision to advise police to arrest its own students for breaking an unjust law, or ignore that law and face the wrath of public opinion in tax-paying, law-abiding, middle-class Dunedin. As a business reliant on its domestic and international reputation, it’s not difficult to see which way it would turn.

No matter which way this falls, though, the University will simply be reaping the rewards of years of inconsistent policy implementation, not to mention continual evasion of direct questions regarding those inconsistencies.

So, to the University, what’s going to happen now? Will you overreact, crack down on the Wednesday and Friday 4.20 meetings, and let the Campus Cop arrest students for possession of cannabis? Will you call other police officers onto campus, and risk the media storm and breakdown of relations with OUSA that would result? Will you tell the Campus Watch to back down and ignore cannabis smoking, as long as no one complains? Or will you disestablish the Campus Cop position, given that it’s stepped past the boundaries you assured students were set in stone? Answers to (any of) these questions would be greatly appreciated."
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As Critic went to print, we heard from NORML Otago that someone was going to come down on cannabis smokers “like a tonne of bricks.” Whether it’s the University or the police, or both, we’ll have to wait and see. This issue of Critic went to print before last Friday’s 4.20 protest, but you can follow the issue on critic.co.nz for updates and relevant news.

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