Three of four students arrested after Molly sickened a dozen people at Wesleyan University. From left: Eric Lonergan, Rama Agha Al Kakib and Zachary Kramer. (Middletown Police Department via AP)
Four students have been arrested on drug charges and suspended after 10 students and two visitors who took MDMA, popularly known as “Molly,” were hospitalized at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. The charges all relate to possession and distribution of drugs.
The Associated Press reported that police said the drug came from a “bad batch.”
“This particular batch may have had a mixture of several kinds of designer drug chemicals, making the health risks unpredictable and treatment to combat the effects complex and problematic,” Middletown Police Chief William McKenna said.
[A dozen hospitalized after apparently overdosing on Molly at Wesleyan University]
The arrested students were identified by police as Eric Lonergan of Rio de Janeiro; Andrew Olson of Atascadero, Calif.; Zachary Kramer of Bethesda, Md.; and Rama Agha Al Kakib of Lutherville, Md. They are due in court on March 3.
A letter from Wesleyan’s president was circulated Monday and urged students with information about those using and distributing Molly to come forward.
“We will do everything we can to make our community as safe as possible,” university President Michael Roth, who occasionally writes for The Washington Post, said in a statement.
Elite New England liberal arts schools are no strangers to drug use, and Wesleyan is no exception. On Niche, a Web site that says it provides “college reviews for students by students,” Wesleyan earned an “A+” overall grade — but a “D-” for drug safety.
“Wesleyan is, well, Wesleyan,” one commenter wrote in 2012. “Drugs are everywhere. I can’t step out of my dorm without smelling marijuana. On Saturday and Sunday morning, you can easily walk through campus and see red Solo cups and beer cans strewn about. In spite of this, Wesleyan does a relatively good job on drug safety with presentations … only your freshman year though.”
In 2010, the school banned “misuse and abuse” of prescription drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall not because they are dangerous, but because they are unfair.
“The misuse of prescription drugs was banned not because of concerns over health, safety or illegality, said Michael J. Whaley, Wesleyan’s vice president for student affairs,” as Inside Higher Ed reported, “but because the activity violates the spirit of the student honor code.”
Then there’s the school’s assortment of drug-taking holidays named after “Doonesbury” characters.
Students and the administration squared off in 2008 over the celebration of Zonker Harris Day, a spring festival honoring a marijuana enthusiast from Gary Trudeau’s comic strip. Substances not found in the average drugstore’s candy aisle are traditionally consumed on the holiday, which competed with a university-sponsored event called “WesFest.”
“I think parents of prefrosh” — “frosh” is Wesleyan’s gender-neutral term for “freshmen” — “have called up and said that they don’t like to go to a place where there’s drug use on 4/20 and Zonker Harris Day,” the president of the dormitory sponsoring the festival said at the time. “I think the administration is trying to whitewash WesFest for the hoity-toity Upper East Side parents.”
The administration wanted the holiday renamed, along with another festival named after yet another “Doonesbury” drug enthusiast called Uncle Duke Day.
“Zonker Harris Day should not be on the calendar next year, and it won’t be,” Roth said at the time. “The institution should make it clear that it’s not supporting things that are stupid.”
When Trudeau caught wind of what some students called censorship, he produced a number of comics focused on the controversy in 2010.
“President Roth declared the holiday ‘stupid,’ which is what I’d always thought smart people look for in a break,” Trudeau said. “It made no sense to me. But it was just one letter, so I stayed out of it. I didn’t want to be presumptuous.”
In a statement, the university said it was “flattered to be satirized” by Trudeau — and, in 2011, let the festival go with its original moniker.
“I have come to a better understanding of their position with respect to the name of the event,” Whaley wrote in an e-mail to the campus newspaper at the time. “I think that they have also better understood my concerns about some of the very problematic behavior associated with past festivals (when the ZHD moniker was last used). When I met with them this week, we agreed that they would be able to call the event ‘Zonker Harris Day’ this year and that we would all work to prevent unwanted behavior that would jeopardize the future of the event.”
Correction: An earlier version of this report misspelled the name of Rama Agha Al Kakib in a photo caption.
