THE NEW ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS

On Campuses Across The Country, Opposition To Government Drug Policy
Heats Up

Say you're a student who needs help paying for college.

You order the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) from the
Department of Education and start answering the 104 questions.

On Question 28, a curveball: "If you have never been convicted of any
illegal-drug offense, enter 'I' in the box and go to Question 29:" No
convictions, you mark the box and move on. But anyone who has been
convicted in an adult court of possessing or selling drugs, misdemeanor or
felony, might need to find another way to pay for school.

Question 28 is the result of an amendment to the Higher Education Act that
was sponsored by Indiana Congressman Mark Souder, which went into effect on
July 1st. A conviction for possession renders the applicant ineligible for
a federal loan for one year from the conviction date. Before reapplying, an
approved rehab program must be completed.

For more serious convictions, a student can be excluded from aid for more
than two years, or even permanently. Eventually, the law will apply only to
students who get a drug conviction while they are receiving federal aid.

This latest governmental assault on drug users is not a new idea: It was
first proposed in 1992 by New York Congressman Gerald Solomon before it
became law in 1998. Souder said, "Taxpayers have a right to know that
students who have a drug-abuse problem aren't using tax dollars to go
through school." But critics note that the new law punishes people who've
already been punished - not necessarily because of a "drug-abuse problem" -
and it mandates no similar provisions for assault, arson, rape or any other
crime. They say the law is typical of the worst excesses of the War on
Drugs, targeting the poor and the nonwhite - those who have been
statistically proven to make up an inordinate percentage of drug
convictions. African-Americans constitute thirteen percent of the U.S.
population and roughly thirteen percent of its drug users, but they
comprise fifty-five percent of drug convictions.

Solomon and Souder, the law's founders, may have provoked an unintended
reaction. The student movement against the current ultra-punitive system
had been fragmented into isolated groups with different agendas.

But the Higher Education Act provision has antagonized all of these groups.

Now students of different cultural and economic backgrounds are slowly
beginning to unify so that they can lobby Congress as a bloc.

BACK IN 1998, WHEN SOUDER WAS writing the provision revoking federal loans
for convicted drug users, a dread-locked, six-foot-six-inch
eighteen-year-old named Kris Lotlikar was interning at the Drug Reform
Coordination Network in Washington, D.C. Then a sophomore at the Rochester
Institute of Technology, Lotlikar had been involved with the Rochester
Cannabis Coalition, which evolved into a new organization, Students for
Sensible Drug Policy, when members decided they wanted to broaden their
mandate. "We became more and more aware that the problem wasn't just with
marijuana being illegal," he says. "It was the drug war in general."

In D.C., Lotlikar met a George Washington University student named Shawn
Heller, and soon Heller formed the second SSDP chapter, at GWU. Through an
Internet newsletter - and with the help of DRCNet's sizable mailing list -
they began publicizing issues and ideas, highlighting the HEA drug
provision. Soon, "there were groups popping up all over the country," says
Rochester Institute's Chris Maj. Today, students at thirty schools,
including Yale, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas,
are active in SSDP; George Soros' Open Society, the Lindesmith Center,
DRCNet and the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation provide the group with
funding and support.

Spurred by the SSDP, more than twenty student governments and the
Association of Big Ten Students have endorsed repeal of the HEA provision,
as have the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and the United States
Students Association, among others.

SSDP's first national conference, at George Washington University last
November, drew 250 students. Conference attendee Randy Short, a Republican
African-American graduate student at Howard University, says, "It's pretty
powerful when you get kids from the suburbs who are weedheads, and you get
people like me agreeing that something is wrong." The agenda covered HEA,
of course, but also mandatory minimums, crack-cocaine sentencing
disparities, private prisons and possible alternatives to current policies,
including legalization and harm reduction. "I was just blown away," says
Ethan A. Nadelmann of the Lindesmith Center, the keynote speaker. "I don't
think anybody involved in drug-policy reform had seen that level of
mobilization by university students."

These are kids who grew up on the D.A.R.E. program, on "just say no"
rhetoric, amid ever-stricter drug laws and ever-stiffer penalties. "The new
student drug-reform movement is not about drugs, it's about justice," says
Alex Kreit, a senior at Hampshire College who helped successfully push the
administration to set up a loan fund for drug-provision casualties. (Yale
students are lobbying their school to do the same.) "It's about the fact
that millions of people are locked up who shouldn't be. It's not people who
are saying, 'Hey, I really want to do drugs: It's a lot of people who say,
'I'm sick of the drug war. I'm sick of seeing children lied to. I hated
D.A.R.E. when I was in school: I think a lot of people are sick of it."

SSDP members write letters in bulk to editors of school and local papers
and advise new chapters.

They trade information and ideas over the Internet. They write to
congressional representatives, conduct voter-registration drives and stage
protests (they got kicked out of a Bush rally in New Hampshire). They quote
the same statistics - more than 2 million prisoners in the country, roughly
a quarter of them nonviolent drug offenders - and speak of the drug war
with the same sense of anger and betrayal. "For so long, we've perpetuated
it in the name of saving the children and protecting young people," says
Lotlikar. "We were the young people," and what they were taught did not
bear out in the realm of experience: In fact, all drugs are not equally
harmful; good people use drugs, even presidential candidates; and drug
consumption often seems to be more of a medical issue than a criminal one.

Sometimes the odds against them seem overwhelming. SSDP member Dan Goldman
of the University of Wisconsin says that his initial thoughts on getting
involved were, "I'm one little kid, what can I do to change the War on
Drugs?" Three years later, he says, "I feel like I can do a lot."

But still, the members' youth can work against them. "Student groups'
opinions don't get weighed very heavily around here, because they don't
vote," says Congressman Barney Frank, an ally who has called for repeal of
the HEA drug provision.

And SSDP's wide-ranging agenda is easily caricatured. "Students for
Sensible Drug Policy is really students who want no policy," says Kevin
Sabet, a senior at Berkeley and the founder of International Students in
Action, a group that works to establish "drug-free" campuses.

Sabet believes statistics showing that use has gone down is proof that drug
policy is working.

He has gone to raves to hand out scientific information on ecstasy use and
has, worked in drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey's office.

If there are some sentencing horror stories, he says, it's better than what
would happen with any kind of decriminalization: According to Sabet, SSDP
is nothing more than a thinly veiled legalization campaign that hands out
false information at the behest of Soros, Nadelmann and other reform veterans.

The stooge charge is one that SSDP members, understandably, find insulting.
But it's a reminder that even discussing legalization can stigmatize
people. The activists realized quickly that tie-dyes and ponytails are best
avoided. "To be taken seriously, we felt that we had to avoid the druggie
image," says Mount Holyoke junior Denise Goetsch. For Lotlikar, that meant
chopping off about two feet of dreadlocks. "I walk in [to presentations]
with the natty dreads," he says, "people are going to have a preconceived
notion." And that, says Kreit, "alienates students who don't use drugs and
are against drug use but really hate the drug war."

BY MID-AUGUST, THE DEPARTMENT of Education had processed 7.5 million
financial-aid forms for the upcoming school year. Either because they
didn't believe the question pertained to them, or they feared answering,
about ten percent of the applicants left Question 28 blank.

The Department of Education was thrown into chaos, spending resources it
didn't have to try and return the questionnaires to students.

This year only, the department did not automatically disqualify students
who didn't answer.

Ultimately, less than one percent were ruled ineligible because of a
possible drug conviction: 4,500 temporarily, about 1,000 indefinitely.
"We're inconveniencing 10 million customers, and fewer than 1,000 fall into
the category of people who are ineligible for this specific reason," says
Karen Santos Freeman of the Department of Education. "I think you have to
look at whether it really is efficient and meaningful."

In May, while under pressure from SSDP and other groups, the House
Education and Workforce Committee re-examined the Higher Education Act drug
provision. In a victory for the student lobbyists, Mark Souder, the
amendment's author, revised the law so that it only affects students who
are already receiving financial aid - though he maintained that those were
the students he had been targeting all along.

At the hearing, Souder was the only representative strongly arguing against
repeal. "Even to this day," says SSDP member Steven Silverman, "he's the
only person I've heard defend this thing." Nevertheless, the committee
voted 30-16 against getting rid of the provision. Souder also won another
big victory, by pushing through an amendment that requires students to
answer Question 28 or be ruled ineligible for aid. "Now we have high school
seniors being more presidential than the Democratic and Republican
nominees," says Brian Gralnick of GWU, who is an SSDP national co-director.
"But they're being encouraged to lie, just like our presidential
candidates," adds Silverman.

If the student activists fail to get the HEA amendment repealed, the law
might hurt many would-be students.

Take Jay Clarke, 32, a former heroin addict who is clean after years of
trying to kick. He currently has a 3.6 grade-point average at Tidewater
Community College in Virginia. A methadone user and a member of the
Virginia Alliance of Methadone Advocates, he plans to transfer to Old
Dominion and then pursue a career in substance-abuse treatment. He receives
federal aid for school and now knows he is eligible only because he never
got caught. "That's just it: I got lucky," he says. "I never got
arrested.... I would have never thought I could do something like this. I
dropped out of high school, and now here I am fourteen years later." If
someone told him he couldn't go, he says, "that would really devastate me."

As school begins this year, SSDP wants to develop more West Coast chapters
by capitalizing on connections made during the shadow convention in Los
Angeles. "As our student movement grows," says Lotlikar, "it's gonna become
less and less about us asking questions and asking for government change,
and more and more about demanding change."