Drugs and alcohol—nobody can deny the fact that they are present and used by students at Gunn. Maybe you remember filling out a social norms survey about the usage of illegal substances way back in 2006, but what ever happened to those surveys?

The results have been organized and presented by posters, created by the Drug and Alcohol Committee. By combining graphics and statistics, the Committee hopes to show the student body that the usage of illegal substances by students is not really as high as we think. But are these posters really useful?

The Drug and Alcohol Committee has taken an important step by trying to change the social dynamic—by refusing to participate both mentally and physically is normal. But their efforts need to continue to push the poster project further, so that students will really begin to understand that drinking beer and smoking weed is not “cool.”

You may have seen the posters... or not. In order to have an effect, the posters need to be better promoted. Because they have not been publicly announced or officially introduced, many students still do not know they exist—a clear setback to the well-intentioned goal of the project. The main concern was that students were ingraining the wrong perception of drug and alcohol usage at Gunn in their peers, but how can they get a sense of the right perception when they have to search all over walls of buildings to find the posters?

Another issue is that students rarely trust the honesty level that has been applied to the surveys. If I were someone who used an illegal substance frequently, I doubt that I would voluntarily take my pencil and bubble in “daily” to answer that question. Students do not form their opinions based on school-wide surveys that are conducted in their math classes; they usually perceive things from their environment and the activities going on in their surroundings. If a student spots a large group of people smoking while on his or her way to Jamba Juice, it would not be odd for him or her to suspect that many people participate in this form of “recreational activity”. In order for students to really change their view on this important issue, the school should focus on preventing blatant disregard of the law on the school campus that may skew a student’s perception of illegal drug and alcohol use.

While these are two aspects of the poster project that seem to be holding back its progress, there are some positive points to the Committee’s efforts as well. Although drug and alcohol usage is known to be present at Gunn, there have been few students who take the initiative to take a stand against the issue—just Assistant Principal Phil Winston standing near the path with a Jacoubowsky microphone. The members of the Drug and Alcohol Committee should be praised for their leadership in voluntarily acting to improve the apparent misconception of illegal substance incidents at Gunn.