Greek or crack, that's the question

Winston Ross has an article at Newsweek.com about new problems for universities:

On the last day of classes at Reed College, the prestigious, small, liberal-arts school in Portland, Ore., placards go up on the borders of campus, announcing to outsiders that for the next two days, the general public is not welcome here. That's to allow "Reedies" (and their invited guests) to celebrate in private the end of their notoriously rigorous classes by blowing off steam at the college's annual "Renn Fayre" event (euphoniously rather like RenFaire, or the Renaissance Faire), held this past weekend. It's a hedonistic display of shiny spandex costumes, glitter, painted breasts, lube wrestling, over-the-top public makeout sessions, neon, theses torched in a giant bonfire outside Hauser Library, fireworks, and screaming that can be heard from blocks away.
Think of Renn Fayre as higher education's Burning Man; or Woodstock, without the legendary rock acts. It's a raucous, raging outdoor party, replete with current and former students hoisting one another upon their shoulders and tackling their giggling classmates to the champagne-soaked turf.
And it's no fun sober. To be a teetotaling bystander among the blotto masses at Renn Fayre is to feel like one of those kids lining the walls at the junior-high dance, desperate to exude that "I am having a fantastic time" expression that only looks authentic if you are actually having a fantastic time.
That's why some Reedies are less than stoked about U.S. Attorney Dwight Holton's best effort to clamp down on drug use at the affair, a case made so forcefully in a recent meeting with Reed president Colin Diver that it left Diver wondering whether he might wind up in jail, prosecuted under a Federal statute that was enacted by Congress to stiffen penalties on the proprietors of crack houses.
Yes, crack houses. Holton did not actually threaten to lock Diver up. But he did end a meeting that he insists was more about "What can we do to help?" by referencing the statute, which carries a twenty-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. And, when pressed, Holton says he could actually imagine using it, if the college knowingly allowed the kind of open-air drug peddling and usage around which Renn Fayre is long rumored to revolve. "I don't lose any sleep whatsoever at the prospect that I'm going to end up in jail or with a $500,000 fine," Diver told Newsweek. "But it would really, really be unpleasant if either I or the board of trustees were hauled into court on an investigation into whether we were running a crack house. This would not be fun."
Why the tough talk from the Feds? Holton says there are three critical factors: two of the college's 1,300 students have died of heroin overdoses in the past two years; federal agents, battling a surge in black-tar heroin use and distribution in Oregon that is increasingly targeted at upper-middle-class white kids like those that dominate Reed's student body, have been hearing rumblings that drug pushers were stocking up in anticipation of this year's Fayre; and, according to some media reports and the word on the streets, the college's annual hoopla has historically been a great place to get lit on any number of different substances. (Willamette Week, the local alternative weekly, has breathlessly covered Renn Fayre in the past— a lengthy 2008 piece quoted Diver as saying Reed is a college known for two things, "brains," and "drugs"— to the dismay of some students and professors, who say there may be drug use on campus and at the event, but it's not anywhere near as blatant as described and certainly not condoned. A Newsweek reporter smelled pot, but didn't see any drug use during several hours spent at the festival last weekend.)
Holton decided to reach out to Diver in the wake of the latest heroin overdose in March, which left senior physics major Sam Tepper dead in an off-campus apartment, at age 22. "Sam's death, plus the symbolic importance of Renn Fayre, created a moment for Diver to seize," Holton said. "We wanted him to seize it." Diver did respond, despite calling the U.S. Attorney's response an overreaction. The president quickly sent out a campuswide email urging students not to use drugs, several varieties of which he specifically named. He's pledged to revisit the school's drug-enforcement policy, which has in the past taken a nuanced, two-tiered approach where "hard drugs" are vilified, but others not as much, which Holton is concerned results in a mixed message to campus. (Alumnae who attended Reed in the late 1990s say they can remember times when weed was smoked openly in the Student Union building.)