Yet it doesn’t need to — nor should it — be this way. As drug use is becoming destigmatized and understood as not a criminal issue but rather a health and socioeconomic issue, Yale can and must do more to prioritize public health and prepare community members to respond. 

We write this piece to outline recommendations that we have kickstarted, in partnership with and inspired by Yalies who have been fighting for better drug policy and resource access on campus. Last year, after conversations with off-campus student groups that work on drug safety across Yale and New Haven, we proposed and passed a $2,500 funding bill in the Yale College Council, or YCC, Senate to purchase 25 boxes of Narcan from local pharmacies. These boxes were then provided to Students for Sustainable Drug Policy, or SSDP, at Yale to more adequately institute methods to train its students and staff with resources to reduce fatalities. 

Our project ran into many roadblocks. Then, Yale was not necessarily ready to accept the institutional burden, nor was it easy to purchase Narcan. Only one pharmacy — the Walgreens Pharmacy inside a Yale New Haven Hospital building — was licensed to prescribe one Narcan prescription per day, per patient. 

We weren’t deterred. Instead, we grabbed groups of friends to have multiple Narcan containers prescribed to us each day until we ran out of funds. The pharmacist was supportive of our efforts but was legally restricted in the amount of Narcan they could provide daily. We then gave the 25 boxes of Narcan, with two nasally-administered overdose-reversing treatments, to SSDP to distribute to students, off-campus groups and community spaces. 

Since spring 2023, the landscape of Narcan has drastically changed. In March, the Food and Drug Administration announced that Narcan would be available for purchase over-the-counter starting July 2023. In December, the Biden-Harris administration called on schools and institutions to have Narcan stocked and readily available. While we work closely with SSDP and Yale Emergency Medical Services, or YEMS, to ensure Narcan is available on Yale’s campus, it is time for Yale to shed itself of its War on Drugs mentality from 1990 and step instead into 2024: students, staff and faculty need and deserve training on administering Narcan — on campus, off-campus and beyond. 

Student initiatives and funding efforts can only function for so long. YCC’s budget is not large enough to train and supply every student with Narcan, and SSDP and YEMS are not expansive enough to train and educate everyone on the issue. 

The time for broad action and preparation is now. We must become proactive in preventing overdose, not reactive. Yale cannot wait for something to happen and realize it must meet the moment. By then, it’ll already be far too late.

We call upon Yale to take up the burden of safe drug education, overdose prevention and harm mitigation. It’s time to live in 2024 and ensure that every member of the Yale community has the means to protect strangers and loved ones from preventable death. Yale’s hierarchy must shift. We must strive to radically shift University policy to prioritize students and New Haven residents’ well-being over the protection of Yale’s image. 

JULIAN SUH-TOMA is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College and is president of the Yale College Council. Contact Julian at julian.suh-toma@yale.edu. 

VIKTOR KAGAN is a senior in Pierson College and chief of staff for the Yale College Council. Contact Viktor at viktor.shamis-kagan@yale.edu.

The post SUH-TOMA & KAGAN: Narcan can save lives. Why is Yale so slow to act? appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I’ve served with two YCC administrations — and while they each approached YCC differently, they both strongly opposed Yale’s disregard for student welfare. There’s a common misconception: that YCC doesn’t care. Both YCC administrations put in hours upon hours of work per week, meeting with administrators whose humanity has been warped by the large paychecks the institution sends them for paying lip service to student concerns.

As a new Senator, you learn something quickly: if it costs money or is internal-facing, Yale will probably ignore your demands. I’ll never forget sitting at a town hall in 2021, where an administrator outlined the cost for free laundry on campus at around $300,000 annually — a miniscule sum compared to Yale’s budget — and then proceeded to ignore my requests for free and clean laundry. This isn’t to say that my first year in YCC wasn’t without victories. For example, a ridiculous 25 percent room fee if you decide to take a semester off was removed. Doing this didn’t lead to loss in Yale’s income, so it was an easy change. And when administrators made COVID-19 decisions back in Fall 2021 without considering travel costs for FGLI students, I organized YCC members to challenge these inconsiderate decisions. We convinced Yale to create a student-led COVID-19 committee, which administrators did listen to — for the Spring 2022 semester. But, despite these wins, it sometimes felt like YCC was screaming into the void, with administrators unwilling to work on significant issues.

None of this changed in my second year. Yale administrators are still making Yale even more difficult for low-income students: kicking them out of their organizations’ offices and ending on-campus storage all in the name of  “equity.” It’s a curious sight to see an institution with a $41.2 billion endowment refuse to expand institutional support to low-income students, refuse to fund a lawsuit against CSC’s gross — literal and legal — negligence of our laundry machines, and refuse to pay for meals during Spring Break — but easily find money for ornate dinners. Until I co-led an initiative with Ryan Smith and Alex Sundberg demanding that to-go containers be returned to dining halls, Yale was going to discontinue the practice because it got “too expensive.” Yale as an institution is so driven by its finances that it forgets the people who sustain it.

I could ramble on about my frustrations with Yale. However, I want to talk more about YCC itself, and highlight my fellow Senators, E-Board members and friends who motivate me to have faith in YCC advocacy. Early on, I decided I didn’t want to sit back, go to meetings and call it a day. Nor did some of my fellow 2024s. Sure, some of our ideas were a bit unrealistic, but we cared. We were guided by passionate E-Board members. I began to use my social media platform to highlight my work, posting on my Instagram story and tweeting the efforts I was pursuing. I ran on the idea that YCC must improve its communication with students and I think I helped us do that. The YCC is not a government, nor is it the be-all-end-all of decision-making. We can yell at the Yale administration as much as we want, but its bureaucracy kills almost all of our ideas. Unless we are ready to donate millions, our voices don’t seem to matter. As the YCC, we must rally campus frustration to show administrators that we as a student body demand more.

The Senate — and YCC as a whole — made a lot of progress this year. It’s been refreshing to see new Senators take charge on issues we failed on last year. As a seasoned Senator, I led the laundry charge — it still fascinates me that I needed to beg for a simple conversation between Yale and CSC to occur — and although it hasn’t yet led to free laundry, it has set the stage for demands and negotiations for the future. The group of Senators I work with have real passion for change, with laundry and other issues. They’ve passed proposals for stipend fundings that help FGLI students like me, challenged administrators and showed me that there’s still hope for student advocacy.

My time in YCC has been both inspiring and frustrating, but I’m hopeful for the future. Next year, YCC will have choices to make — especially on how it presents itself and challenges administrators and the institution they represent. Although I will no longer be a Senator, I fully believe that Julian Suh-Toma and Maya Fonkeu have the vision to platform students and demand more from Yale. Their leadership in YCC for the last two years speaks to it: when I was asked to work to get Narcan on campus, I turned to Julian, who quickly organized with student groups and we both pushed, successfully, to fund the first effort on campus to get Naloxone available. I trust Maya because she has been actively working with Julian to make dress clothes more affordable for low-income students, like me. Their work in YCC speaks volumes about their desire to make life better for the student body, with or without the administration. Both of them have built amazing coalitions of students, groups and communities, whose input they listen to and then center in their advocacy, never fearing to challenge inequities on campus. They know what YCC needs and have the platform — a realistic platform — to accomplish it. With Julian and Maya at the helm of the organization, I have faith in the YCC being a successful advocate for students.

I am proud to endorse Julian and Maya and cannot wait to vote for them as my next YCC President and Vice President.

VIKTOR KAGAN is a junior in Pierson College who has served in the YCC for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 terms. He proudly organized the Laundry Advocacy Committee and on FGLI issues to ensure students are heard by administrators. 

The post KAGAN: YCC: A reflection and an endorsement appeared first on Yale Daily News.