Rolling Back The War on Drugs

The Senate is preparing to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. This is a chance to strip some very harmful law from the act which prevents students with drug-related convictions from receiving financial aid. Students for a Sensible Drug Policy have a novel video modeling what it's like to do the activism:

I think this is probably a really smart thing to do: video yourself doing a little lobbying, and I hope it works. This rule is one of the most counterproductive, knee-jerk pieces of "law and order" legislation out there. It was passed in 1998 under Clinton and is a particularly good example of how ineffective and culturally insensitive his "third way" really was. Check out the personal story from Jesus' General, who got busted hooking up some informants w/pot in 1979:

I only served a few months of my sentence behind bars. Space was limited. I was young, and wasn't dangerous, so they set me free on the condition that I remain employed and report to a parole officer every month for the remainder of the five years.

As horrible as the experience was--and it was a nightmare--it didn't change me. If anything I became worse, freebasing cocaine and doing a lot of mushrooms and MDMA (it's called ecstasy now). I was high all of the time again and dealing for real--no more buying bags for a friend--to be able afford it.

Then I met a woman, a single mother with two kids. We started dating. I wanted to get serious, to live together, but she refused because she had applied to go to college and didn't want to put down roots in Tremonton. I told her it had been my dream to go to school, but I couldn't afford it. She told me about financial aid, something I'd never dreamed existed. I know that may seem hard to believe--My 2007 self hardly believes it even though my 1984 self lived it--but it's true.

The following September, I began my first day at Weber State College. It changed my life. It became ok to be smart, no one mocked me for it or told me I was full of shit when I talked about things they didn't understand. I dove into my studies relishing learning for the sake of learning. I reveled in it. I eventually went on to get a graduate degree.

I stopped getting high (except for the toke I take every five years or so to remind me how paranoid it makes me). The ability to go to college made me a productive member of society.

If I had waited a few years, I wouldn't have been able to receive financial aid. The feds cut it off for people with drug convictions in the nineties. Without that opportunity, I'd probably be dead, in prison, or God forbid, a Republican right now.

The whole post is worth reading. There are hundreds of thousands of stories like this that didn't end so well. Time to change that.