By Chris Badeaux
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 17, 1997

'Campus Health? Send over a bag of crack and a ho, please'

Arizona Daily Wildcat Chris Badeaux

As many of you know, on Tuesday and Wednesday, there will be a student vote on a proposed $40 per semester fee that students will be asked to pay to help fund the construction of the new Memorial Student Union. Recent polls and letters to the editor suggest that there's no way the Little Referendum That Could will pass.

The recent debate on the student fee to fund the Student Union, the tuition hike approved by the Regents last school year and the mysterious way that the Integrated Instructional Dungeon didn't need any student support, all point to a single thing: The UA needs money.

University students, especially but not limited to male university students, usually come to school at just about the height of their sexual drives. With an increasing number of older, female, non-traditional students entering, yet another sexually energetic portion of the population is on campus. Sex is all most of us think about; consider how easy it is to sell a high-interest credit card on campus if an absolutely gorgeous male/female in a tight T-shirt sitting behind a table smiles winningly and says, "Hi. Interested in a Killmenow Card?"

The University needs cash. Students need sex.

Here's how we can make the two needs work together:

The Campus Health Center should retain a staff of prostitutes. By charging a reduced rate for this service, the school can effectively compete with more experienced brothels in Tucson. By offering positions to male and female students (no need to be sexist here - there's some real profit lurking in the male meat market), the UA can increase student employment. By sterilizing these students, the chance of unwanted pregnancy from the transaction in which they take part will be effectively zero.

Further, each student-prostitute could be tested ahead of time for sexually transmitted diseases. If the VD is curable, great, launch the sulfa drugs. If not, then the applicant would be turned down. Each student-prostitute would, after every transaction, be tested again for STDs. If treatment is possible, the student can be given heavy doses of antibiotics and sent back out to work again (not, of course, interfering with his/her class schedule). If it's something like herpes or AIDS, then the student would be released. And, of course, all student-prostitutes would carry prophylactics. That'll make the spread of disease even more unlikely.

Think about all of the benefits. Students don't have to think, "Damn, how can I get a date for tonight," because there's a ready-made date waiting at Campus Health! "Boy, I'm horny," turns into "Hello, Campus Health? Can you send over two young women to Yavapai Hall?" Unwanted pregnancies won't even be a consideration, and emotional involvement will be virtually zero.

The real money, though, lies in the other service the prostitutes offer - drugs. Just like Lucky Luciano, the University could use prostitutes as "mules" - essentially, mobile dealers for heroin, methamphetimines, cocaine, crack cocaine, and even (though they're not so profitable these days) LSD and marijuana.

This has some real potential. There is a lot of money to be made in illegal drugs. Even better, money raised by selling such drugs is by definition non-taxable income. Want to fund the Student Union quick? I guarantee, four years of selling meth and crack to the campus and local Tucson community will pay for the whole damned thing.

There's another upside involved here: Pure drugs. With Campus Health and maybe one or two organic chemistry professors or lab TAs in on the project, we can be sure that experts are doing the refining and cutting of these drugs. That way, the drugs sold to students will be correctly produced, free from any dangerous additives or cutting agents, and completely safe (or at least, insofar as crystal meth and crack can ever be "safe").

As a final bonus, with university backing and access to the numerous labs on campus, production would be cheap, and, thus, the cost of the product would be low.

In fact, by offering some chemistry and biochemistry professors research grants (most would rather be researching than teaching, anyway) the university could offer new, cheaper, more exciting drugs in a fraction of the time it normally takes the market to produce them. (For example, cocaine use in this country was almost a century old before someone came up with the idea of crack.)

Oh, sure, there's the question of legality. Technically, Tucson city ordinances prohibit prostitution and drug dealing. Certainly, there could conceivably be some thorny legal issues involved here.

On the other hand, on this campus, rape and hazing - crimes far worse than prostitution and selling drugs - are frequently not treated as crimes at all. In fact, they can be referred to the Dean of Students as Code of Conduct violations. The University uses a federal law - the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act - to make this possible. Since sexual assault and physical abuse only merit time spent in detention, why should anyone really care about two victimless crimes?

There's also the issue of degradation. In the real world (thank God we're not in the real world here), prostitutes most certainly do not live a carefree life of ease and happiness. That's why our prostitutes would be paid the sort of healthy wages student employees normally get, and would receive free medical care for on-the-job injuries. It's still not a perfect solution, but, hey, it's not a perfect world.

If this proposal goes into effect - and I think a lot of administrators would leap at the chance to have this sort of revenue available on a consistent basis - we can forget tuition hikes, we can forget funding shortfalls and we probably can forget declining enrollment while we're at it (after all, if high school seniors are promised an oasis of drugs and sex and a top-notch research institution, they'll come in droves).

And, best of all, we can vote "No" on tomorrow's student referendum with a clear conscience.

Chris Badeaux is the Opinions Editor. For those of you who've figured it out, he's a British Literature major, too.