Purdue, Ball State attempt to gauge students’ substance use trends

Editor's Note: The following is part of a class project originally initiated in the classroom of Ball State University professor Adam Kuban in fall 2021. Kuban continued the project this spring semester, challenging his students to find sustainability efforts in the Muncie area and pitch their ideas to Deanna Watson, editor of The Star Press, Journal & Courier and Pal-Item. This spring, stories related to health care will be featured.

MUNCIE, Ind. – For Indiana colleges like Purdue University and Ball State University, there remains an ongoing battle to understand students’ substance use patterns.

These schools send out surveys with the hope of drawing enough responses to get an accurate representation of how many students engage in substance use and what substances they use. However, getting students to fill out these surveys can be challenging.

Knowledge of students’ substance use trends is perhaps more important now than in the past with the increasing prevalence of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine, which has resulted in a sharp increase in opioid overdoses.

According to a 2021 data brief from the National Center of Health Statistics, drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone (the category fentanyl falls under) increased by 56% between 2019 and 2020. In a single year, the number of deaths per 100,000 people jumped from 11.4 to 17.8.

This is because the drug is incredibly dangerous. A dose of as little as two milligrams can lead to trouble breathing, dizziness and even overdose. Illegal drug manufacturers will mix fentanyl into other drugs like methamphetamine, non-fentanyl opioids like heroin and even Adderall to produce a greater high while saving on production costs.

College students are one of the populations most at risk of ingesting these fentanyl-laced, illegally manufactured drugs. According to results from the 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the age group with highest amount of opioid use was young adults aged 18 to 25, and in May 2022, two Ohio State University students died after overdosing on Adderall pills that contained fentanyl.

Beyond the risk fentanyl poses to a student’s life, the drug, along with other opioids taken recreationally, negatively affects a student’s day-to-day health. According to a 2021 study published in the journal “Applied Research in Quality of Life,” college students who took opioids recreationally reported lower perceived physical and mental health.

Incidents like that of the Ohio State students along with the general effects drug use has on a student has led to several universities across the country making an effort to promote the health and safety of their students through education and the distribution of naloxone, a medicine that rapidly reverses an opioid overdose. Some universities across Indiana have not followed suit, however.

One of the main reasons for this is these universities’ lack of insight into how many of their students are actually engaging in recreational drug use. Dane Minnick, director of the Center for Substance Use Research and Community Initiatives (SURCI) at Ball State, believes this is true regionally for universities across Indiana.

“It's a problem at a lot of universities where getting good data on campus (about) substance use trends — it just isn't there,” Minnick said, “because you can look at campus incidents, but that's going to really inaccurately capture what's actually happening. The frequency of students getting arrested on campus and then being reported in the statistics is going to be very low.”

Ball State University Police Department’s Detective Lt. John Foster seconds the notion that crime statistics may not always be the best representation of how an issue affects a community.

“There have been differing studies talking about crime rates and how do you measure crime,” Foster said. “What's a good way to do that? Is it by the number of reports that you get? If that's the case, some of that may be dependent upon how well the Police Department gets along with the community.

“If you don't have a good relationship with the community, maybe there's less people that want to report to them whereas maybe if you have a really good relationship, you know, the reporting numbers perhaps go up because people are willing to come to the police to have things investigated.”

According to Minnick, to capture the substance-use trends of students at the university, Ball State uses a biennial survey, but due to the survey’s low response rate the past several years, the university cannot glean anything from the results.

“Without really robust surveys in place, you're really kind of flying blindly in terms of what's happening on campus, and right now, we just don't have a good idea, especially with how the opioid impact is or how the pandemic has impacted substance use trends among students,” Minnick said.

At Purdue, a more robust system is in place.

Purdue utilizes the Indiana College Substance Use Survey, which occurs every odd-numbered year. The university is currently waiting on results from this year’s survey.

Will Evans, assistant senior director of wellness at Purdue, believes that, while it would be helpful if the response rate for the survey were higher, it still provides an accurate portrayal of the Purdue student population. It is the results from this survey over the years that seem to indicate fentanyl is not as much of an issue on the Purdue campus.

“According to our data, it's not a huge concern at all based on our campus, but it is something that we keep an eye on,” Evans said. “We talked about it at almost every meeting. We ask the group members if they're seeing or hearing anything new concerning that.”

To decide what’s important and not important to address on a college campus requires an understanding of the student body. Attaining this understanding requires effort on the parts of the universities through using and effectively employing tools like the Indiana College Substance Use Survey to learn more about the students.

This article originally appeared on Muncie Star Press: Purdue, Ball State attempt to gauge students’ substance use trends