UC students push for a place to get — and stay — sober on every campus

Four years clean from methamphetamine and with five associate degrees in hand from a community college in California’s Central Coast, Cheech Raygoza began his undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley in 2022 feeling like he was in prison — again.

Away from his fiancé, kids and grandchildren, and plucked from his community in Santa Maria, he was alone — like all those years he served behind bars.

“Something that came natural to me when I moved to Berkeley was isolating,” Raygoza, 55, said. “I was in a cell for 13 years, so I know how to do time by myself.” For the first year at one of the nation’s top public universities, “I didn’t go out anywhere, I didn’t go to the libraries, I didn’t utilize the resources at Berkeley.”

But over time that began to change as he met more friends — themselves students in drug recovery — through a small program at UC Berkeley that’s also at half of the University of California’s 10 campuses. These collegiate recovery programs hold regular weekly meetings for students in some stage of battling drug and alcohol addiction or some other form of self-harm. 

The University of California Student Association, which represents the system’s 233,000 undergraduates, is mounting a campaign to bring the program and university funding to every campus. After almost a year of advocacy, the student organization brought the program to UC’s largest stage, the UC Regents meeting, in July. Student advocates want a full-time coordinator at every campus, ongoing funding for each program and a private, dedicated meeting space at every UC.

The University Office of the President maintains that every campus has some kind of drug prevention, intervention and treatment program. But student advocates say the collegiate recovery programs are unique and provide an important outlet for students who need a nuanced approach to vanquishing their drug dependencies. The first was founded at Brown University in 1977. Today, scores exist on campuses across the country.

The need for drug recovery centers

Though he was sober coming into the program, Raygoza said that “recovery isn’t something I take for granted.” The addiction is always there. From rock climbing and kayaking events to dinner with participants in the recovery program, “It’s just so awesome to be part of this community,” he said. “It helps me live.”

It took nearly a year for him to emerge from 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. This most recent semester, he earned straight A’s, he said.

After leaving prison in 2014 and enrolling at Allan Hancock College two years later, he continued using and dealing, even as he got on the dean’s list for good grades. In 2018, his fiancé told him to “get right or get left,” as he put it.

Raygoza put himself in detox for 14 days. His clean date is Aug. 3, 2018. He’s been drug- and alcohol-free ever since. 

The university system estimates that the existing programs served 4,000 students last year. A 2023 national survey indicates that 1.6% of UC undergraduates are in some form of drug or alcohol recovery.

But likely many more could benefit from a drug recovery program. The same 2023 survey showed that, depending on the campus, around 50% to 70% of undergraduates reported drinking at least once and a third to half have tried cannabis. Smaller, but still notable, shares of students have used other drugs at least once: roughly 3% to 10% used cocaine; as much as 2% tried meth. Among UC Berkeley students, nearly 1% had tried heroin.

“I cannot emphasize enough that this is literally a life-saving initiative,” said Johnny Smith, who graduated from UC Berkeley this spring and is about to begin his doctoral studies at Harvard. Smith, himself formerly incarcerated and a one-time middle school dropout, spoke at the UC Regents meeting last month, detailing how the program helped him and others who were in drug recovery.

What the program does

Often with few dollars and not even a single full-time staffer, these programs foster a community of peers who together navigate their sobriety through the thicket of tempting or illicit substances that are often rife on their college campuses.

The programs serve multiple purposes: group meetings, more targeted support from a campus coordinator who may also refer the students to mental or medical help on or off campus, and if there’s money, a slew of social events. Some, like the one at UC Davis, distribute fentanyl test strips and Narcan, an overdose-reversing nasal spray, for free. 

Unlike more familiar substance recovery programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, collegiate recovery programs don’t demand abstinence from all substances when a person pursues recovery from one in particular. Collegiate recovery programs don’t necessarily follow the 12-step process and instead pursue a playbook of helping students establish a manageable relationship with drugs and alcohol. So if a student wants to quit a drug but occasionally drink, for example, that’s OK.

“That’s something I love about (collegiate recovery programs),” Raygoza said. “They meet you where you’re at and there’s no judgment.”

He also credits a group for students who were in or had family members in prisons or jails, Berkeley Underground Scholars, for helping him feel integrated on campus. Attending church and his faith in God are vital to his recovery, too, he added. Sometimes his fiancé comes to visit and attends a meeting with him. He aspires to earn a doctorate in education and teach youth in his hometown.

The program’s “harm reduction” approach is meant to appeal to more students who aren’t ready to fully abstain from all substances, but need help quitting or dialing back from a substance that’s personally destructive.

“What I’ve seen for a lot of people is, once they get involved in the (college recovery program) and they see people that are totally sober, they’re like, ‘Oh, I can still have fun being totally sober,’” said Stephanie Lake, the current coordinator at UC Davis’s college recovery program, called Aggies for Recovery, and a full-time substance abuse therapist on the campus. “A lot of them do eventually get to total sobriety, but harm reduction at least gives them a way where they’re reducing the harm of their drugs so that they’re able to function in a better capacity.”

Lake said that harm reduction is a newer practice that became more common in the past five years, though she’s been practicing it her entire career. One of the weekly meetings uses an Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous speaker format to give students a sense of how those meetings look like, she added.

Still, students hooked on certain hard drugs will struggle to moderate their consumption.  Lake described one student she counseled a few years ago who wanted to continue using heroin on weekends. She told the student to see if he could limit his usage after three weeks. He couldn’t, but also didn’t want to quit. A few months later, he came back to her, ready to get sober. Lake then referred him to treatment. 

“That’s why I say I meet people where they’re at, because they might not be ready,” Lake said. “And if I actually said, ‘You need to quit now,’ they’re going to get mad at me.”

One thing Lake won’t tolerate: glamorizing drugs. She’s kicked out students who boasted they’d do drugs after recovery program meetings. “It’s triggering other people,” she explained.

Collegiate recovery programs are also located on campus, another benefit, UC officials wrote in an agenda item to regents last month. That’s because not all students have the transportation means or time to seek services that are off-campus, like Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, intensive outpatient services and Suboxone treatment.

Need for full-time coordinators

The UC Student Association stresses that each campus needs to employ a full-time coordinator. At UC Davis, Lake officially spends 5% of her time in that role — on top of the four to six students she sees daily for counseling. The campus intends to hire a full-time coordinator this fall, which she says couldn’t come soon enough. 

She wasn’t able to apply for outside grants to fund the recovery program because she was busy with her full-time therapist job. The recovery program sponsors events on weekends — making it hard for her to attend after a full week’s work seeing other students. If she had more time, she could reach out to students in the program who’ve since graduated to request donations or ask to speak at meetings.

She also guides two student facilitators who work part-time leading the group meetings. They include Ashlyn Reed, an incoming fourth-year student. The program has been instrumental in helping her remain off the substance that she has struggled with the most — nicotine. It’s her fourth time quitting; this stint has been the longest she’s gone without smoking — six months. She said the group meetings helped her examine why she relied on nicotine as an emotional crutch. “What am I hiding from or trying to avoid?” she said.

But she also feels the limits of the program without a full-time coordinator. “We’re the best kept secret on campus, and we don’t want to be,” she said. Without a full-time coordinator, there’s no one to market the program on campus, where hundreds of student and community groups compete for attention from the campus’s 40,000 students through leaflets, live events and other outreach.

Students pushing for a recovery program on every campus insist on ongoing university funding to support them as well as dedicated space for the meetings.

“I cannot emphasize enough that this is literally a life-saving initiative.”

Aditi Hariharan, a student at UC Davis who has advocated on behalf of the UC Student Association for these centers, expressed concern that some regents at the July meeting encouraged campuses to seek county health grants to fund the programs. Navigating county bureaucracy is difficult, she and other student advocates said, and even if the funding comes through, it’s not a guaranteed ongoing source.

“County grants are also temporary and need to be reapplied and reapplied, and don’t assure that permanent funding that CRPs should have,” said Hariharan, who recently was elected as the student association’s president.

Ryan King, a spokesperson for the UC Office of the President, wrote that each “campus sets priorities within its budget and must balance competing priorities.” He added that the system is exploring additional funding through the California Youth Behavioral Health Initiative and the recently passed Proposition 1, a state initiative to raise billions of dollars for housing and treatment facilities for mentally ill Californians. The UC maintains a $50 billion budget and about a fifth of that is for its main education mission, including student services.

Dedicated space for meetings would be nice, too, advocates of collegiate recovery programs say. Beyond ensuring privacy, a room just for the recovery program could serve as a refuge for students maintaining their sobriety who want to avoid large social events where drinking and other substance use are commonplace.

“If there was a space where they could just hang out during that day, there wouldn’t be so much temptation to relapse,” Lake, of UC Davis, said. The campus’s program relies on temporary meeting spaces, including the lobby of a student health services building. 

UC Berkeley’s center just received its own space. Previously, students attending meetings in an administrative building would need to sometimes enter the police department to gain access to the building — an awkward encounter for individuals trying to confide to each other about substance abuse. Other times campus deans would cross the communal space during group meetings.

“The fentanyl crisis and everything else, it’s a scary time for me as a counselor,” Lake said. Having the collegiate recovery program “is just super, super important.”