ANTIDRUG OVERKILL

Making drug offenders ineligible for federal student aid runs counter
to rehabilitation efforts. The law should be dropped or at least scaled back.

One need not excuse a university student who smokes marijuana to
understand why yanking the student out of school usually serves no
one's longterm interest. But that is one of Congress' key weapons in
the war on drugs.

Under a law adopted five years ago, any drug conviction, even
misdemeanor marijuana possession, makes a current or prospective
university student immediately ineligible for federal financial aid.
The result, of course, is that most of those students no longer have
the means to pursue a higher education. So they drop out or never
attend in the first place. According to a coalition of groups trying
to overturn the law, some 160,500 students have lost aid that way.

"It's contrary to every theory of rehabilitation," says Hernando
assistant public defender Elizabeth Osmond.

In Washington, the House Education and the Workforce Committee took
only a half-step Friday toward giving students a second chance. It
sent to the full House a Higher Education Act that would allow
federal aid, under certain circumstances, for students who have past
drug convictions. But the committee defeated an effort to drop the
ban altogether.

Some 240 organizations and 115 student governments have petitioned
Congress to get rid of the ban. They aren't arguing that drug use
should be legalized, or that students should be freed of
responsibility or criminal sanction. Their point is that young people
do make mistakes and removing them from college only makes it more
likely they will make more. That's how some of them end up being
criminals as adults.

"For people who are having a hard time with their lives," says David
Borden, executive director of the Drug Reform Coordination Network,
"this is discouragement at exactly the time when they've decided to try."

Apparently, members of Congress consider marijuana smoking as a
"youthful indiscretion" only when required to acknowledge their own.