ADVOCACY GROUP FIGHTS AGAINST DRUG CONVICTION ACT Group Calls On U.S. To Eliminate Act That Denies Students Financial Aid Members of the Students for Sensible Drug Policy have recently filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education for withholding information that may help the advocacy group fight a law that prevents students who are convicted on drug charges from receiving financial aid. The law was enacted in 1998 when Congress decided against allocating federal taxpayer-funded student aid to students convicted of drug offenses. Students were then required to disclose whether or not they have been convicted of any drug-related crimes before applying for aid. Ross Wilson, legislative director of the SSDP, wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Education in 2004 requesting the state-by-state breakdown of responses by students, saying that this information would allow him to "'inform policymakers, the news media, and private citizens about how the presence of the drug conviction question on the FAFSA affects applications for aid in each state and territory.'" Wilson also included a request to waive the $4,124 fee the Department of Education charges for the list of student responses, which the Department of Education denied, according to a Sep. 20 letter to Wilson from the Department of Education, and the SSDP then filed the lawsuit to obtain the fee waiver. According to Chad Colby, spokesman for the Department of Education, the Department did not consent to the waiver because administrators found the request was not in the public's interest. "The reason the department refused to grant the few waiver is because this organization failed to demonstrate that its request was in the public interest in that it was not likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of the government," Colby said in an email. Colby added that the records were "not primarily in the commercial interest of SSDP ... the Department did not seek to charge the SSDP the commercial rate - they assessed them at the 'other requester' rate, which is a lesser rate." More than 175,000 students have applied for Financial Aid but have been denied because of their answer to the drug-conviction question on the financial-aid forms, said Tom Angell, campaigns director of the SSDP, adding that SSDP wants to "erase this policy from the law books" and called such laws "ineffective." According to Angell, this 175,000 calculation is not an accurate projection of students who did not receive financial aid because it does not include those who did not apply. "The laws are intended to reduce drug abuse, but really, it increases abuse by blocking education," he said. "It makes our nation's drug problems worse." Angell said the SSDP would rather see students "become productive and move on with their lives," adding that "only convictions while someone is a college student should cause them to lose aid." SSDP has made significant progress as Congress recently amended the law so that only students convicted of drug offenses while in school and receiving aid are impacted, a change that the Department of Education Administration supported. Under this amendment, after a student's first conviction, they lose financial aid for one year, after their second conviction for two years, and after that they lose any aid indefinitely, Angell said. Even with these changes to the act, SSDP members say they are not satisfied until the the act is scrapped altogether.
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