Just walk around a college campus on a weekend, you won’t have to look hard to see inebriated college students celebrating the end of the week with drugs and alcohol alike.

Despite efforts to combat it, the use of drugs is intrinsically tied to college culture across the United States. According to The National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, “37% of college students have used an illicit drug (Opioids, Stimulants, Benzodiazepines, Cannabinoids, Barbiturates) and abused alcohol on a regular basis.”

When asked about their experience on campus when it came to drugs, an anonymous Sonoma State student said, “I pulled up to a dorm party and there were a few guys who I didn’t know there. The usual suspects [at parties] are always alcohol and weed. This particular time a couple of students I didn’t recognize showed up. And they were doing lines of cocaine off the table.  No one tested the drugs or anything like that despite the fact that it is widely known that fentanyl is present in certain batches of cocaine.”

The presence of illicit drugs on campus means that students are susceptible to fentanyl overdoses, so shouldn’t testing kits be provided on campus? Or at the very least, shouldn’t students be able to purchase them on campus? As of now, no such program exists at SSU,  despite the fact that it would directly combat fentanyl overdoses.

If the war on drugs has proven anything, it’s that the strategy of promoting abstinence from drug use is simply ineffective. According to a recent report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy, “Arresting and incarcerating tens of millions of these people in recent decades has filled prisons and destroyed lives and families without reducing the availability of illicit drugs.” Regardless of the possible repercussions of using drugs from both law enforcement and campus officials, students continue to experiment with them.

However, the recent presence of fentanyl and other filler substances has made using drugs more dangerous than ever before. Provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate there were an estimated 107,622 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2021, and of those, “Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, was involved in the most overdose deaths in 2021 at 71,238.”

According to the CDC, ”Some drug dealers are mixing fentanyl with other drugs, such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and MDMA. This is because it takes very little to produce a high with fentanyl, making it a cheaper option.”

Although fentanyl is the leading cause of drug overdoses in the United States, testing kits are available to prevent this from happening.

The CDC states,”Fentanyl test strips (FTS) are a low-cost method of helping prevent drug overdoses and reducing harm. FTS are small strips of paper that can detect the presence of fentanyl in all different kinds of drugs (cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, etc.) and drug forms (pills, powder, and injectables).”

Despite the fact that many college students use illicit drugs that could contain fentanyl, these testing strips are not widely available on college campuses. However programs such as the Team Awareness Combating Overdose, are working to make fentanyl fix this problem.

They already have distribution centers in seven states and hand out free fentanyl testing strips on campuses and make them available for purchase for as little as 1 cent per strip. This is a program that should come to SSU, as it could save the lives of students all across campuses.

”I think it’s a great idea. Too many young people die from fentanyl, and I believe it would be a great program to save students’ lives,” said an anonymous student.

Simply put, students will continue to use drugs on campus, and something as simple as widely-available fentanyl testing strips could protect the lives of many.