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After four years free of methamphetamine and five associate degrees from a community college on California’s Central Coast, Cheech Raygoza began his undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley in 2022 feeling like he was in prison – again.
Separated from his fiancée, his children and grandchildren, and torn from his community in Santa Maria, he was alone – as he had been for all the years he spent behind bars.
“When I moved to Berkeley, it was natural for me to isolate myself,” said Raygoza, 55. “I was in a cell for 13 years, so I know how to spend my time alone.” In my first year at one of the country’s top public universities, “I didn’t go anywhere, didn’t visit libraries, didn’t use Berkeley’s resources.”
But over time, that changed as he met more friends – themselves students in drug rehab – through a small program at UC Berkeley that is also offered at half of the University of California’s 10 campuses. These college programs hold weekly meetings for students who are at some stage of battling drug and alcohol addiction or another form of self-harm.
The University of California Student Union, which represents the system’s 233,000 students, is launching a campaign to bring the program and university funding to every campus. After nearly a year of lobbying, the student organization brought the program to the UC’s biggest stage, the UC Regents meeting, in July. Student representatives want a full-time coordinator on every campus, ongoing funding for every program and a private, dedicated meeting room on every UC.
The university’s office of the chancellor claims that every campus has a drug prevention, intervention and treatment program. However, student advocates say the college recovery programs are unique and represent an important opportunity for students who need a nuanced approach to overcoming drug addiction. The first was founded at Brown University in 1977. Today, there are numerous programs on campuses across the country.
The need for drug rehabilitation centers
Although he was sober when he entered the program, Raygoza said that “recovery is not something I take for granted.” The addiction is always there. From rock climbing and kayaking events to dinners with recovery program participants, “it’s just great to be part of this community,” he said. “It helps me live.”
It took him nearly a year to come out of his shell, Raygoza said, and now he’s leading meetings himself as a part-time student facilitator, a paid job he’s had for a year. He got straight A’s last semester, he said.
After being released from prison in 2014 and enrolling at Allan Hancock College two years later, he continued to use and deal despite being on the dean’s list because of his good grades. In 2018, his fiancée told him to “go right or go left,” as he put it.
Raygoza underwent a 14-day rehab program. He was clean again on August 3, 2018. Since then, he has been drug and alcohol free.
The university system estimates that existing programs helped 4,000 students last year. A 2023 national survey shows that 1.6% of UC students are in some form of drug or alcohol withdrawal.
But many more could probably benefit from a drug rehabilitation program. The same 2023 survey found that, depending on the campus, about 50 to 70 percent of students reported drinking alcohol at least once, and a third to half have tried cannabis. A smaller but still notable share of students have used other drugs at least once: About 3 to 10 percent used cocaine; up to 2 percent tried meth. Among UC Berkeley students, nearly 1 percent had tried heroin.
“I can’t stress enough that this is literally a life-saving initiative,” said Johnny Smith, who graduated from UC Berkeley this spring and will now begin doctoral studies at Harvard. Smith, himself a former prison inmate and middle school dropout, spoke at the UC Regents meeting last month and detailed how the program has helped him and other drug addicts.
What the program does
These programs, which often operate with little funding and not even a single full-time staff member, foster a community of like-minded individuals who work together to find their way out of abstinence through the thicket of tempting or illegal substances that are often prevalent on their college campuses.
