University of Alabama quietly testing fraternity brothers for drugs

AL.com – by Conner Sheets

Every week, several members of the University of Alabama’s Sigma Nu fraternity chapter are randomly chosen to report to a cluster of dingy offices on the bottom floor of the school’s Russell Hall and urinate in a cup.

Though the compulsory exercise sounds like a rush-season hazing ritual, it is in fact a central component of a strict new anti-drug effort launched at the start of the fall semester.  

Beginning this academic year, UA has been quietly drug-testing active members of multiple Greek organizations, including the Alabama chapters of the prominent Sigma Nu and Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternities, in the first run of a mandatory screening regime that some experts say is the boldest and most extensive in the nation.

Six current and former members of the impacted chapters told AL.com over the past month that they now require their members to submit to periodic urinalysis at a UA facility in order to maintain good standing with the organizations and the school. The university confirmed that it is drug-testing members of some Greek organizations, though it declined to say how many or which ones. In addition to testing urine, the university has played a role in testing samples of some fraternity members’ hair for evidence of drug use over a period of months.

The mandatory drug testing has generated controversy among fraternity members who say that it invades their privacy, unfairly targets Greek organizations and drives abuse of risky, hard-to-detect drugs like Xanax.

‘It’s pretty intense’

At the beginning of the school year, every active member of the Greek organizations participating in the drug-testing program was required to pass a comprehensive drug screening. The tests were coordinated by the organizations in conjunction with the university and carried out via the MPACT (Maximizing Potential through Academics Community & Treatment) substance abuse program, part of a collaborative effort between the university’s Student Health Center and the Dean of Students’ Office of Student Conduct.

After the initial assessment, several members of each of the Greek organizations – all of which cooperated with the university on the rollout of the testing regime – are chosen at random each week throughout the school year to undergo another round of urinalysis.

“It’s pretty intense, but I guess it’s effective. Five percent of the brothers get tested each week,” Clyde Yelverton, president of Sigma Nu’s UA chapter, told AL.com earlier this month during an interview inside the fraternity’s massive red-brick house on University Boulevard. “This is the first semester MPACT has done a whole fraternity testing program. We were actually the first fraternity to join it.”

Failing or missing a drug test subjects fraternity brothers to penalties and punishments that differ based on a number of factors ranging from substance abuse history to the type of drug detected. Sigma Nu issues escalating warnings and punishments before eventually notifying the university and kicking out brothers who repeatedly fail drug tests, and MPACT offers a range of services to help students get back on track before the school doles out harsher penalties.

The new drug-testing program is one of the boldest anti-drug initiatives currently in place at any American university, according to David Westol, principal and owner of Limberlost Consulting Inc., where he works with fraternity chapters across the nation on issues including risk and crisis management, membership reviews and hazing.

“I’ve heard about Alabama doing drug screening or drug testing of fraternities, but I’m not aware of any other university that’s gone to that point and using it to any great extent,” he said.

A number of Alabama fraternity chapters have implemented their own drug-testing programs in recent years and the university says they have been permitted to do so for some time. UA spokesman Chris Bryant declined to answer a series of questions about the school’s role in testing Greek organizations’ members for evidence of drug use.

“Chapters have had the option of implementing substance abuse testing for their members for several years – since approximately 2009. The chapters make the decision to test in these instances,” Bryant said via email. “UA supports their decision. Sometimes testing is a result of sanctions placed on the chapter as a disciplinary action.”

‘They’re killing the fraternity’

Greek organizations independently electing to undergo drug-testing is not a new phenomenon at the University of Alabama. But this semester appears to be the first in which the university has carried out mandatory urinalyses of fraternity members in accordance with its rules instead of fraternities selecting third-party providers to implement in-house drug-testing protocols determined by their members and leaders.

Though the practice has become much more common in recent years, individual fraternity chapters have required their members to submit to drug tests under certain extreme circumstances for years. In 1991, for instance, members of UA’s Alpha Tau Omega chapter “voted to voluntarily submit to drug testing to clear their organization’s name” in the wake of a major hazing, alcohol and drug scandal, the New York Times reported at the time.

And self-imposition of drug testing by UA fraternity chapters has become increasingly common in recent years, according to Margaret Garner, executive director of the university’s Student Health Center & Pharmacy.

“A number of years ago one fraternity on campus was required by its Advisory Board to initiate random drug testing as a means of making a statement about its commitment to a wholesome environment in regards to responsible use of alcohol in particular,” Garner said via email.

“Since then others have joined in. Fraternities decide voluntarily to do this and have initiated those testing services from an external, independent source.”

The institution of the new university-affiliated drug-testing program at some UA Greek chapters has been a point of hot controversy among their members. Multiple fraternity brothers both active and inactive told AL.com that they feel that it is unfair for them to be forced to submit to drug tests that are not required of the greater student population and that the university’s intimate role in the process subjects them to greater risk than when fraternities independently decided how to implement and enforce such testing.

The intrusiveness of the tests also bothers several current and former fraternity brothers who told AL.com that the level of imposition seems to be increasing over time, slowly driving some students to abandon the Greek system entirely.

“They’re killing the fraternity from the inside without even knowing it. It’s just a little too babysitting-like. We’re 21, we’re adults,” said a current Alabama student who didn’t want to be identified criticizing the Greek system. He was a member of SAE for more than three years before quitting the fraternity after the chapter announced it would be testing brothers’ hair for drugs beginning this past spring semester.

“When they switched over to wanting to hair-test everybody – they did test everybody – I was like f*** that. I didn’t want, like, a fat bald spot where they f***ing shaved my head. You can feel it. It’s like a little chunk of hair so they have enough samples because it has to be conclusive. It’s got to be, like, three months’ worth.”

SAE has been under high levels of scrutiny in recent years, as nationwide “at least 10 deaths since 2006 have been linked to hazing, alcohol or drugs at SAE events, more than at any other fraternity, according to data compiled by Bloomberg,” which in 2014 dubbed it the “deadliest” frat in America. In 2009, Auburn University’s SAE chapter became the first in the nation to require its members to undergo compulsory drug testing, according to the Auburn Plainsman.

But the UA chapter of the far less controversial Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity also has a policy in place requiring its members to have their hair tested for evidence of drug use, according to the chapter’s website, which details the university’s central role in the testing initiative. The chapter has subjected its members to mandatory periodic drug tests since 2009.

“The particulars of testing (location, date and times) will be prearranged by the third party administrator (TPA) in conjunction with Student Health Services. Testing will be by hair sample conducted by a professional testing lab and following their procedures and chain of custody protocols,” the chapter’s official policy states.

“Students selected for testing will be notified by email by the TPA and given a two week window to report to the Student Health Services for hair sample collection. All hair samples will be tested by the testing lab for a 90 day window of detection of use of illegal drugs.”

‘A higher standard’

Fraternity leaders say that drug-testing members can be a necessary evil and that it is beneficial because it boosts Greek organizations’ reputations, helps ensure illegal activity is not taking place and keeps members focused on academics, community service and legal fun.

“We were sanctioned by the university maybe five years ago because some people got in trouble with drugs, so the fraternity had to provide results once a semester for maybe 15 to 20 percent of the people in the house,” Rob Grabowski, whose year-long term as president of Sigma Nu ended in November, said last week. He added that the fraternity hired the third-party provider LabCorp Corporation to do the testing until this past fall semester, when UA started testing its members’ urine at a cost of $25 per test.

The new drug-testing initiative has had overwhelmingly positive results, according to Yelverton, who pointed out that because fraternities and sororities are private organizations, they can impose a wide range of restrictions on their members, including mandatory drug tests.

“We test with UA MPACT. They came up with it and we’ve worked with them to come up with a system more for fraternity use,” Yelverton said, adding that Sigma Nu brothers are subjected to urinalysis but not hair tests. “Being a fraternity, we just like to hold people to a higher standard. We were drug-tested before with LabCorp and it was just inefficient and everyone could fake it … Now it’s a more advanced test.”

In June 2013, the UA chapter of DKE submitted an application for a national Greek award that detailed the chapter’s various triumphs and achievements. The document details its strict drug-testing policy, describing it as an overwhelming success that helped raise members’ grade point averages and improved the fraternity’s standing on campus.

As of 2013, UA’s DKE chapter was drug-testing samples of its members’ hair for drugs at the beginning of each semester and once every 60 days after that, according to the award application. That year, the chapter increased the penalty for failing a drug test from a “strike” to automatic suspension from the fraternity, which had zero drug violations the previous academic year, according to the document.

“The changes in new member drug testing will drastically help individuals who come into the Chapter with any drug dependency get help immediately,” the award application states.

“Through these changes, the Chapter continues to show other fraternities on campus as well as other DKE Chapter (sic) that drug usage can be controlled within a college environment, reducing the number of addictions and potential deaths stemming from habitual drug use.”

Despite the benefits cited by many fraternity leaders, multiple current and former UA fraternity brothers told AL.com that drug testing is leading to addiction issues far more severe than the frequent marijuana use and occasional cocaine problems that for years defined UA’s Greek drug scene.

Current UA student and former active Sigma Nu brother James Blackwood said he believes that drug-testing has “completely backfired” at most UA fraternity chapters that have implemented it. He said that regular drug screenings have driven many marijuana smokers to turn to harder, more addictive drugs like the anti-anxiety medication Xanax, which can be legally prescribed and is more difficult to test for than most other illicit substances.

Last month, Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson publicly identified Xanax abuse as a “public health crisis,” and the vast majority of the UA students and fraternity brothers AL.com interviewed over the past month said that it has become the most popular drug after marijuana at the university in recent years.

“People can beat Xanax because it goes through your system in three days. That’s why there’s so much,” Blackwood said.

“There’s this one fraternity – really well-known on campus, attracted a lot of attention – that started getting drug-tested and it’s still talked about how this fraternity went from, like, a group of guys who functioned normally and held high position among the university and then they all just became ‘bartards’ – that’s the term for people who eat Xanax bars. They all went from just, you know, regular college guys to just zombies, all doing Xanax because they couldn’t smoke pot and stuff so it was the only thing they could do.”

This exclusive report on drug culture on university campuses is the first in an ongoing AL.com series. Look for other stories in the coming days.

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