DISCRIMINATION PLAGUES ACT

ON OCT. 7, President Clinton signed into law the Higher Education Act of
1998, which includes a provision that will deny or delay federal financial
aid to any student with a drug conviction, no matter how minor. In
response, students across the country are participating in a growing
campaign to have the provision overturned. They have good reason to get
involved.

Whatever Congress' intent, the law's impact will be discriminatory on
several levels. First, the law represents an additional penalty, over and
above court-imposed sanctions, levied upon lower and middle class students.
Wealthier students, the children of legislators for instance, will be
virtually unaffected.

While the law allows for provisional reinstatement of eligibility if a
student undergoes drug treatment and random drug testing, such treatment is
largely unavailable to those without significant resources. The federal
government's own 1997 study indicates that 48 percent of America's drug
treatment needs are currently unmet. In fact, only 7 percent of the federal
drug war budget is earmarked for treatment, while the overwhelming majority
goes to enforcement and military interdiction.

Finally, for most young offenders, getting caught with a small amount of
marijuana no more indicates a medical need for substance abuse treatment
than a college sophomore's underage drinking citation indicates alcoholism.

Next, the law singles out young drug offenders--the overwhelming majority
of whom are convicted of non-violent possession--as singularly unworthy of
federal financial aid. Convictions for sexual assault, stalking or perjury,
for example, carry no such penalties.

Most disturbingly, this law will discriminate based on race. The reality of
the drug war in America is that it is prosecuted most vigorously in poor
and non-white neighborhoods. According to a 1995 report from the Sentencing
Project, blacks, who are 12 percent of the population, and who make up
approximately 13 percent of all drug users, comprise 55 percent of those
convicted of drug offenses.

The Sentencing Project's report also indicates that today in America, fully
one in three black males in the 18-29 age group is under the "supervision"
of the criminal justice system. Overall, 75 percent of those entering the
corrections system are either black or Latino. Are the drugs gone yet? Why
should we believe that making it more difficult for those who've already
been punished to enter the mainstream through education will have a
positive impact?

The drug war is decades old, costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars
per year and has given America the highest per-capita incarceration rate on
the planet. In states such as California, Maryland, New York and others,
more money is now being spent on prisons than on higher education.
Imprisoning a young person, by the way, costs taxpayers far more than does
a Pell Grant or a Stafford loan--and once educated, these students will be
contributors to society, on the tax rolls and productive.

Escalation of the drug war has long been justified as necessary to "protect
children" from drug use. But it would be difficult to find a single college
student who could not have bought illicit drugs while in high school. The
University of Michigan's "Monitoring the Future" survey indicates that 90
percent of high school seniors say that illicit drugs are "easy" or "fairly
easy" to obtain. Today's college students were the same children the
escalation of the war was designed to protect. But have we "protected" a
single young person from access to drugs? Can we point to a single "drug
free" high school? If not, when exactly will it be time to reevaluate the
punitive focus of our policies?

The newest weapon in Washington's drug war places obstacles in the path of
young people who are trying to get their lives together through education.
Surveys show that more than 50 percent of high school seniors have used an
illicit substance. Are half of our young people unworthy of financial aid?
Or just the poor, the non-white and the unlucky?

Assuming that this law does not make kids "drug free," what's next?
Underage drinking is illegal, and inarguably a more widespread and pressing
campus problem than illicit drug use. Will Washington decide to withhold
financial aid for illicit alcohol use? It is time for college students to
speak up.

Today's college students have become the pawns of politicians who are as
adamant about "zero tolerance" as they are out of touch with the realities
of young people. Impeding education is not a rational policy by any
measure. The Higher Education Act of 1998 gives students the opportunity,
even the responsibility, to join the debate.