Students: Dawn Patrol

At 5 o'clock one morning last week, 200 Suffolk County police quietly drove up to the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York. Entering the dormitories, they pulled out 21 students—as well as eleven nonstudents found on the premises—and arrested them on charges of selling or possessing drugs. Later, eleven more youths were picked up off campus, bringing the arrest total to 43—thus making it the nation's largest campus crackdown so far on drug users.

The county police were armed with warrants based on evidence turned up by hippie-clad agents who had been planted on the campus to mingle in Stony Brook's wide-open dormitories. The spies claimed they had taken part in a large LSD party in a dormitory lounge, witnessed many drug sales, mainly of marijuana but also of opium and mescaline. The university's supervision of the dorms was so lax, police charged, that a number of nonstudents seeking kicks had moved right in. Following agent-drawn maps of where suspects lived, surprised raiders barged into one room and found, instead of their target, his sister, her husband and their two children.

Gestapo Tactics. To Stony Brook officials, who had not been advised that the raid was planned, it looked like something of a grandstand operation. Not only was there a certain amount of melodrama in the dawn crackdown, but nearly a dozen newsmen had been briefed by the cops beforehand and had been given rides to the scene in police cars. Stony Brook Associate Dean Donald M. Bybee called it "a press field day," and a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union quickly protested the pretrial publicity. Students complained of "Gestapo tactics," pro tested that the ill-timed raid coincided with final exams. The campus radio station called the state's antimarijuana laws unjust and obsolete, while students circulated a petition saying "I, too, have smoked marijuana." A faculty resolution deplored the police's tactics, charging that the methods employed were more suitable to "quelling a rebellion" than to arresting peaceful students.

Among other things, the flurry over the Stony Brook raid dramatized the fact that U.S. campuses and law-enforcement officials are not of like minds regarding pot. Most students, as well as many professors, do not believe that smoking marijuana is or should be a criminal offense. Even if they privately share their students' views, college officials acknowledge their obligation to help enforce existing laws—although Long Island police were notably angered by Stony Brook's refusal to let the agents formally enroll as students.