UMD SSDP Chapter History

Also see the UMD SSDP entry in SSDPedia.

Just after midnight, October 1st, 2001, Morgan Lesko and a friend were arrested for a joint behind the Campus Recreation Center. Not able to find a NORML chapter on our campus, he decided to start one up (again). According to early mentor, Chris Evans, there was some form of drug policy reform organization a few years earlier, which had dissipated. The first meeting called was under the name 'TORML', Terrapins for the Reform of Maryland Laws, but an attendee at the first meeting convinced us not to limit ourselves to fighting marijuana laws, since our policies towards the harder drugs are also failing and creating far more harm than good.

With that, he founded the Maryland chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy in the fall of 2001. Even though we did a petition geared towards changing the dorm policies, most of our early efforts were all about educating our campus both on the harms of the drug war and on harm reduction. After the first year or so, Martin Baer and others took over leadership of the organization. However, by the spring of 2003, our chapter was thinning with little progress, graduating active members, and feeling the loud liberal reaction to the appalling war abroad.

After two years dedicated to the campus chapter, Morgan began interning and volunteering with the Drug Reform Coordination Network (www.stopthedrugwar.org) working primarily on the Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform effort. DRCNet shares an office suite with the national SSDP office and Flex Your Rights (www.flexyourrights.org). During the summer of 2004, SSDP asked if the University of Maryland chapter would be willing to host of annual national conference on our campus. Despite a nearly extinct chapter with only about five members, we decided to host the conference. Though we could not convince that many Maryland students to join us for the conference, people definitely noticed when the drug policy reform movement came to town.

Since then, the University of Maryland SSDP chapter has been steadily growing, largely due to increased popularity among the incoming freshmen in 2005 and 2006. After we hosted the national conference in November of 2004, we maintained a heavy campus presence and felt a distinct difference in the incoming classes during their orientation tours. Since we were around campus so much, we ended up interacting with countless tour groups of perspective students' families. We met so many incoming students who were very excited to see us on campus, and even parent would typically receive us very well.

In 2004-2005, lead by Damien Nichols and by Anastacia Cosner from 2005-2008, SSDP did a second dorm rights petition that we ended up not really using. But after collecting a couple thousand signatures for that petition, we had gained enough support that our Marijuana-Alcohol Equalization Referendum on the SGA ballot passed by a student vote by 65%!

We will continue meeting with the school administration about implementing these changes. With our increasing size, we also hope to hop on the Metro and bring our campus presence to Capital Hill more in the coming years. Morgan is still heavily involved with SSDP, as the webmaster for the national office and some chapter web sites.

But the University of Maryland Chapter of SSDP is in prime position not only to watch changes finally go through on this campus, but given our proximity to and voice added to our theoretically great nation's capital, we just may also be able to set an example for schools everywhere...reminding them that fundamentally, education is most important.