Headline of the Day: ‘UMass to Review Policy on Students as Confidential Drug Informants’

That eyebrow-raiser comes from
Inside Higher Ed, which provided a brief synopsis of a
very curious program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
University police apparently caught a student, “Logan,” selling LSD
in a club a year ago. Normally, this would have led to criminal
charges, a school suspension, and parental notification; instead,
administrators offered to bury the matter and drop the
punishments.

All Logan had to do was become an undercover drug informant for
UMass, according to an unbelievable
Boston
Globe story.

Logan accepted—it was “an offer I can’t refuse,” he told his
friends—and became an undercover UMass police informant. His
codename was CI-8. He did his job and helped the university catch
at least one other dealer.

A year later, his parents—who had no idea about his troubles
with drugs—found him dead of a heroin overdose.

Now some are wondering whether forcing Logan to stay in the drug
culture in order to ferret out other dealers was the best thing for
him, given his addiction:

If Logan had not become an informant, he would have faced
expulsion from his dorm and suspension from school under the UMass
substance abuse policy, and, if the dean of students found he was
guilty of the offenses, his parents would have been notified. He
also could have been ordered to attend a drug education
program.

Instead, Logan was enabled to keep his addiction a secret from
his family. After briefly going cold turkey in the late spring of
2013, he was using again by the middle of July, his text messages
show. Looking ahead to the fall at UMass, he texted one friend that
his apartment would be the “shootup den.”

UMass has announced plans to
review the drug informant policy, at least:

The university defended the program, but said it will review
whether to require informants in drug cases to get help for
possible addictions and whether to notify parents when a student is
recruited into the program.

“The assessment will help determine whether the confidential
informant program can operate successfully with a mandatory
referral to an addiction specialist or notification to a parent
. . . while maintaining a program that deters
distribution of illegal, lethal drugs,” UMass said in a
statement.

A university conscripted a student-addict into dangerous
undercover police work that could have gotten him killed—and in a
way, it eventually did. Ladies and gentlemen, your War on
Drugs.