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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Although it's possible to go through drug rehab to reclaim eligibility, it's a circuitous and insulting process that could deter many students. Students who already have gone through Narcotics Anonymous, for example, are informed that the program doesn't meet federal standards. Their only option is to enter drug rehab again. Students convicted of a minor possession -- say, having a small amount of marijuana -- have to go through the same measures as a heroin addict. Some, if not most, approved drug-rehab programs are both expensive and time-consuming.
Only one of the 48 students at SF State who were denied federal aid bothered to go through rehab, which deeply concerns financial aid administrators. Jorge Bell, the associate dean of financial aid at City College, observed several students drop out rather than undergo rehab. "There might be some students out there who are deciding not to continue their education because of this extra hoop," he says. "Financial aid is so important, if you have to wait for your aid -- or even just wait weeks to go through a drug rehab program -- you may give up altogether."
The Drug-Free Student Aid provision also imposes class and racial biases, in addition to an oddly arbitrary rating of various types of crime. For example, the measure, because it concerns only drug-related transgressions, does not apply to rapists, batterers or armed robbers, among others.
Student groups, infuriated at being singled out as lurking enemies in the war on drugs, have organized against the provision. "Are you telling us that drug laws in the United States aren't deterrent enough?" asks Shawn Heller, national director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, which is coordinating students across the nation to protest the legislation.
"It's drug war politicking," he says. "Souder wants to go back to his district and say 'I'm tough on drugs and I created laws that buckle down on users.' But if he wanted to do anything about drug problems on campus, he'd give additional funds for local programs that actually reduce drugs on campus. It's another zero tolerance law in which you take discretion away from judges and people who deal with these problems on a daily basis, and give it to the federal government instead."
Civil libertarians argue that this law is an example of blatant discrimination, based on income and race. By definition, they say, the law is designed to penalize the less fortunate college applicants: Students who can pay for college with their own (or more likely, their parents' own) money, are unaffected by the law, while needy students are subjected to unfair scrutiny and the loss of an education. The law also unfairly targets minority citizens, by virtue of the deep racial inequality of the nation's war on drugs: Sixty-two percent of those with drug convictions are African-American, even though they make up only 12 percent of the population and 13 percent of all drug offenders.
"It's well documented that drug war enforcement is heavily skewed towards blacks," says the ACLU's Boyd. "Since the Drug-Free Student Aid provision is more about who gets convicted by the system than it is about the drug offense, it's much more likely that you'll lose your funding if you are black than white.
"It's extending the racial injustice that you see on the street corner into colleges, and the consequences are profoundly unfair, since education is extremely important."
Because the provision is a federal law, only prestigious, private institutions have the freedom to financially assist students who have lost their aid to it, thanks to the private money on hand. At public universities -- where more students are likely to have been affected by the law in the first place -- the financial aid offices are bound by their reliance on public funding. But that has not stopped many of them from speaking out against the provision.
