Rice University
- Drug Safety

Drinking Is Popular, but You Are Never Forced to Drink

Since Rice is a wet campus, it basically means that the authorities would not bug you about having alcohol in your room. Unless you are making a scene or someone complained, then drinking is a very visible culture at Rice. There will be private parties or public parties that have drinking, but no one would force you to drink. When other people offer you a drink, they are usually just trying to include you into the party instead of forcing you to drink. I give it a B+ because most people drink responsibly and look out for each other. However, there are just enough of those irresponsible people for it to not get an A rank.

Repetitive Drinking and Smoking With Not Much Other Drug Use

Alcohol is extremely visible, with about half of campus drinking, some for special occasions, some every weekend. You need to be 21+ or pay someone 21+ to procure alcohol. However, when I've talked to people who don't partake, they are annoyed with the drinking scene at Rice for being noisy, and the drinkers are annoyed with non-drinkers for being 'lame' and complaining. We all live together in the same small buildings where you hear everything through the walls. Wet campus means alcohol is everywhere. Freshman are known for being more out of control than the other grades every year trying to impress. Most weekends though, people end up sitting with their friend groups in their rooms drinking and possibly smoking weed. Repetitive and uninteresting party scene.

Policy enforcement ranges from unfair hospitalization to free bagels for drunk students(Rice Emergency Medical Services and Rice University Police Department both vary in their treatment of drunk students). Noise policies are rarely enforced, which adds to the annoyance for non-drinking students who want to study in their rooms.

Drug scene is not very happening, many many people smoke weed (entire floors and rooms smell like weed at my residential college) anywhere from occasionally to all the time. Other drugs I've heard of people doing here are cocaine, shrooms, and MDMA (Ecstasy). They're out there if you make an extreme effort to look and can pay. Prescription drugs (Adderall, etc...) not as common as would be expected with all the hard workers, but it may be I just haven't seen them being used myself.

Lots of Alcohol

All you need to know is, the university placed its students under an alcohol probation policy which included a zero-tolerance liquor ban this past year. It was generally ineffective, reducing the number of alcohol-related medical emergencies but not curtailing the availability or usage of hard alcohol. Rice likes to party (shocking but true) and loves to drink. If you are thinking about applying here, this is absolutely vital knowledge.