CJUS 420: Drug Policy, Crime, and Politics
When Dr. David Khey, professor and head of the Department of Criminal Justice, joined UL Lafayette in 2015, he saw a gap in the curriculum. There was no class focused on drug issues.
So, he developed CJUS 420 – Drugs and Crime: Policies and Politics on Getting High. So he built CJUS 420 -- Drugs and Crime: Policies and Politics on Getting High. The name nods to 4/20, the date tied to cannabis culture, but the class goes much deeper. It traces the long link between people and drugs.
“As humans, we’ve always had substances at our fingertips that change our states of reality,” says Dr. Khey. “We as a species are curious about these kinds of medicines or plants or creations that can cause an altered state.”
Drugs All Around Us
Growing up in South Florida in the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. Khey saw the link between people and substances up close.
During that time, Miami was a hotspot for drug crime, and documentaries like "Cocaine Cowboys" later told that story. In response, programs like D.A.R.E. — Drug Abuse Resistance Education — tried to warn children about drug use.
“As a kid, I saw a culture that was infatuated with music, movies, and television. Sprinkled in there were government-built ad campaigns against drug use that were targeted toward my age group,” he recalls. “And beyond that, my family was impacted by relatives who were chronically going into rehab and having issues with cocaine and alcohol.”
When Dr. Khey became an adult, he chose criminal justice so he could better understand those childhood experiences. He earned a bachelor's degree, two master's degrees in sociology and pharmaceutical sciences, and a Ph.D. in crime, law, and society.
Drugs are one of his main research areas.
“It caught my curiosity to start researching these kinds of patterns of drug use in humanity,” Dr. Khey says. “It just so happened that my time in school was also the heyday of researchers pushing out some very interesting things, and I got to read and add to these things.”
Drug Myth Busts
Dr. Khey's earlier research focused on drug treatment trends, synthetic and new drugs, and drug policy.
Today, he is reviewing the national D.A.R.E. curriculum to see how well it works and whether it is based on evidence. D.A.R.E., which dates to the 1980s, drew early criticism for its hard line and weak results.
When students take CJUS 420, they study the drug issues that Dr. Khey and other scholars examine every day.
“Really, CJUS 420 is all about debunking myths,” Dr. Khey says. “We make sure that students understand that for every legal substance out there, such as Adderall, there’s an illegal cousin, like methamphetamine, that has slightly different effects and is used in different contexts for different purposes.”
Dr. Khey describes it like a Venn diagram: there are drugs used in a medicinal sense and drugs used in a recreational sense. The chemical difference between them is small, but the difference in how society responds to them is much larger.
Sometimes the reason is hard to explain.
“If you look at, for example, the alcohol industry, we have a lot of freedom in terms of potency or in terms of how people take alcohol into their system,” Dr. Khey says. “Do we regulate it? No. Because it’s an established industry that makes a whole bunch of money in taxes. Yet alcohol is the number one contributor as a drug to violence relative to all other substances out there.”
“For every legal substance we turn a blind eye to, we have an illegal sister that we stamp down on and put people in prison or jails for.”
Throughout CJUS 420, students study many drugs and learn how they work and how society came to treat them this way. The goal is to leave the class ready to address drug use in ways that help society most.
“We’re always going to have relationships with drugs and medicine,” Dr. Khey says. “We want to prevent violent behavior and look at how we can live as a society knowing these relationships will always exist."
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