SUPREME GUILT BY ASSOCIATION

Editor -- So, now a generation of senior citizens that grew up with
segregation and is currently living in public housing is to be made
homeless because their grandkids or caregivers use drugs somewhere else.
And a college student who smokes a joint can become ineligible for student
loans; that's a penalty neither rapists, murderers nor thieves must face.

This country has the world's largest prison population, and more than half
of them are nonviolent drug offenders.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling penalizing people simply because
they're related to an alleged criminal, is not dissimilar to the pre- Civil
War edict that any man in a free state could be forced to help capture a
runaway slave. That law was eventually repealed as a result of popular
protest; one can only hope that this madness ends the same way.

DANIEL THOMPSON San Francisco