Weed’s Legal—Except on College Campuses

• Do NOT bring legal weed onto this plaza.

By this time tomorrow you’ll be free to perambulate all around Portland with a fat sack of pot bulging in your pockets. Up to an ounce is completely legal to tote in public under Measure 91.

But a warning to any of you meandering, carefree and weed-laden, through the South Park blocks: Portland State University’s not gonna take it. It looks like none of the state’s public universities are. Because the schools use federal financial aid to help students enroll, and because the federal government, in its wisdom, considers pot as bad as heroin, schools like Portland State are taking a hard-line stance on Oregon’s newfound permissiveness.

“In essence nothing has changed on our campus, in our buildings, or in any of our university facilities,” PSU spokesman Scott Gallagher tells the Mercury. We’re some of the first ones to hear—the university won’t even apprise its students of the regulations until Thursday. “That announcement will be the culmination of our dean of students and legal council and HR department all working together to put some sort of policy in place,” Gallagher says.

Oregon State University, meanwhile, sent out notice today about its pot policies.

“As a recipient of considerable federal funding, such as financial aid and federal grants and contracts for research, Oregon State is required to continue to prohibit the use and possession of all federally controlled substances – including marijuana,” the university says in a web page about the policy. “Consequently, such activity will remain prohibited by Oregon State policy and the OSU Student Conduct Code.”

OSU makes clear the prohibitions extend throughout its work. Instructors won’t teach students how to grow, OSU says, and researchers will steer clear of pot-related experiments. Oregon State is washing its hands of posting cannabis-related jobs, and won’t grant academic credit for students who accept marijuana-related internships.

Update, 6:25 pm: What’s funny about those stipulations is that some of the best, most relied-upon knowledge we have about marijuana in Oregon comes from Oregon State. A professor named Seth Crawford has studied the state’s underground pot market extensively. The university even issued a press release back in January, touting the fact it was offering a “new marijuana policy course” taught by Crawford.

Steve Clark, the school’s vice president of university relations, argues there are differences between what the school is prohibiting and the course offering.

“It doesn’t promote the use or cultivation or distribution of marijuana,” Clark says. “It actually speaks to marijuana and how we as a society set rules or manage marijuana.”

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Gallagher says he expects PSU’s policy to be much the same as Oregon State’s, though all the details aren’t hammered out.

Of course, one big piece is missing from universities’ ability to discipline that ounce-toting perambulator we hypothesized up above: the cops. Toting pot on your person is perfectly legal under state and city law, so police can’t bust you. And of course people have brought clandestine bags of weed onto campuses for decades and will continue to do so. (Smoking in public is illegal under the new law, so that won’t fly anywhere.)

Gallagher notes, though, that the university has options for enforcement.

“We can do ‘no trespass’ rules,” he says. “We can take people to the edge of our campus.” PSU’s also in the midst of establishing its own campus police force, though Gallagher was unclear on what role it would play in enforcement.

So far, we’ve gotten acknowledgement of these policies from just PSU and OSU, but presumably they’ll extend much farther. Higher learning institutions of all stripes leverage federal financial aid.