DRUG DOUBLE STANDARD

Here's another way that rich is better: If you're poor, and a family member
does drugs, you can be kicked out of your home. It doesn't matter, as the
government's lawyer said, whether the kid lights a joint 3,000 miles away.
If the family lives in public housing, it's "one strike and you're out."

Last week, the Supreme Court upheld the 1996 law in an 8-0 vote against
three elderly grandmothers in Oakland, Calif. One was evicted because the
retarded granddaughter she cares for was caught with marijuana three blocks
from the project. The law affects only poor people in public housing,
including 1.7 million families headed by people over age 61 who can be
punished for a drug crime committed by any member of the family.

The justices held that tenants agree to the deal when they sign the lease
- -- not that poor people are in a position to negotiate leases -- and that
the government acted "as landlord of property it owns." Chief Justice
William Rehnquist, who wrote the opinion, prefers to call it "no-fault
eviction." President Clinton used the "one-strike" metaphor in his 1996
State of the Union address.

Like Mr. Clinton, the chief justice said a tenant who can't control drug
use "is a threat to other residents and the project." Actually, drug use is
the threat, not the nearest victim. Punishing the innocent is the only way
the government has thought of to protect poor people from having the
buildings in which they live turned into heroin shooting galleries.

For the poor, sticks; for the well-off, carrots. The government's biggest
housing program is the income-tax deduction for mortgage interest.
Mortgage-payers avoid the threat of punishment for someone else's crimes.
In a "better class" of family -- or a political family in a publicly owned
mansion -- drug offenders go to a private treatment center, and no benefits
are lost. The list of notable offenders is long and distinguished by money
and influence. In poor families, offenders go on waiting lists, and their
relatives face eviction.

As Justice Rehnquist noted in the opinion, "one strike" is not automatic;
the government has a choice about invoking the lease clause. The Oakland
Housing Authority invoked it on the grandmothers. They got to stay on while
their case was in the court. The next move is up to the housing authority,
which can boot them. Treating the innocent as guilty is cheaper than
providing the kind of police presence a neighborhood gets when its
residents pay a lot of taxes. But it isn't equal justice.