The "War on Drugs" has been so terribly ineffective that it leads one to question its true motives. Is the goal really to curtail drug use, or is it to segregate society and vilify the disadvantaged?

A combination of mandatory minimum sentencing and other unjust laws has led to an enormous rise in U.S. prison populations. Thanks to these laws, 60 percent of the federal prison population consisted of nonviolent drug offenders as of ’99. In ’97, about twice as many people were arrested for drug offenses as for violent crimes.

As a result, the U.S. incarceration rate is now six to ten times higher than in most industrialized countries. Indeed, in 2000 the U.S. surpassed Russia to become the nation with the highest incarceration rate worldwide. A side effect of this enormous boom in prison population has been an increase in spending on prison construction. Since it is mostly young college-age people who are ending up in these prisons, fiscal planners have found that the most logical place to acquire the funds needed for building prisons is higher education. Indeed, there has been a direct trade-off in spending: in ’95, federal funding for university construction dropped by $954 million to $2.5 billion, while federal funding for prison construction rose by $926 million to $2.6 billion. These numbers are huge. They reveal that in one year, the federal government reallocated more than a quarter of total spending for university construction toward prison construction.

The laws are unjust in other ways as well: they target minorities and the poor disproportionately while turning a blind eye to the rich. On paper, these laws may seem unbiased, but they tend to be enforced selectively. In ’95, the sentencing project reported that one out of every three black men in their twenties was under correctional supervision. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, African Americans comprise approximately 13 percent of the population and 13 percent of all drug users. Yet strangely enough, more than 55 percent of those convicted for drug offenses are African American. Indeed, the U.S. police and judicial forces in tandem maintain one of the oldest affirmative action policies in the country. This affirmative action policy ensures that a disproportionate number of blacks are convicted of drug crimes, despite the fact that their drug use is only average among the country as a whole.

According to Human Rights Watch, these drug laws violate international human rights treaties because they have the effect of restricting rights on the basis of race. Facing accusation of human rights violations from abroad, one would expect our government to make some effort to curb such discrimination. But instead an even more stringent and discriminatory drug law was introduced last year.

By the amendment to the Higher Education Act (HEA) of ’98, those convicted for drug use are barred from financial aid for a year. After two convictions, they are barred from aid for two years, and after three, they are barred permanently. This law was enforced on an honor system; students had to declare their convictions on financial aid forms. The law went into effect this past fall, and as a result, 7000 students lost their financial aid. Another 790,000 cleverly left the question blank, thereby managing to hold onto their financial aid and leaving drug crusaders fumbling. Unfortunately, governmental anti-drug forces have now wised up to this strategy and are threatening even those who refuse to answer in this coming year. This means hundreds of thousands of students could potentially lose their financial aid and be barred from higher education in 2001.

It doesn’t seem that lawmakers have given the least consideration to the potential consequences of this measure. To suddenly refuse a student financial aid forces him or her either to give up on his or her education or find a quick way to make a lot of money. And what quicker, easier way could there be to make money than to start selling drugs? This law presents the student with a choice of either dropping out of college or supporting his education by selling drugs. Rather than curbing drug use, this new law could turn drug dealing into a necessity.

Furthermore, in conjunction with the criminal justice system’s upside-down affirmative action policy, this law amounts to outright racism. Given that most drug offenders who are convicted are minorities, as are many financial aid recipients, the new policies are bound to thin minority populations in colleges. This legislation also has the secondary effect of weeding out the poor from colleges while legitimizing drug use among the rich, who need not worry about financial aid. All this, sadly, is occurring at a time when higher education in the U.S. was just beginning to lose its aristocratic undertones and become accepted as a rite of passage for all Americans. Removing several hundred thousand minority and non-wealthy students from higher education could set back that process by decades. Is the drug war primarily an effort to stop drug use, or is it another excuse to segregate blacks from whites by imprisoning them, and to prevent the poor and uneducated from rising to the upper echelons of society, where they may indulge in more "cultured" and forgivable drugs, like cocaine?

There is still hope for reversing these trends, however. The ever-expanding empire of drug laws is bound to overextend itself, and it may eventually topple under its own weight.

There is a growing grassroots movement among students and universities against this new elitist law, and with it, the growing realization of the absurdity of the entire U.S. drug policy. Organizations like Students for a Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) are forming on many campuses, and petitioning for change. At Hampshire College, SSDP succeeded in gaining support for an HEA Financial Aid Replacement Fund, which has raised over $20,000 to pay for the lost financial aid of five of it’s students. A chapter of SSDP has even formed at Dartmouth this year. The best hope for changing racist laws like these lies in college students, the future lawmakers of this country.

It is essential to recognize that organizations like SSDP are not "pro-drugs," as "hard-line" anti-drug warriors would have you believe. Instead, they generally believe that our government has adopted the completely wrong approach to the drug problem. These critics of the drug war favor treatment of drug users over imprisonment. It has been shown that for every $1 the government spends on treatment, it saves $7 on criminal justice. SSDP favors a more cost-effective approach to the drug war. It can hardly be a coincidence that the percentage of American citizens who smoke marijuana is two times the percentage of Amsterdam citizens who smoke marijuana, even though marijuana is legal in Amsterdam.

The criminalization of drug use has put its regulation in the hands of corrupt forces that are above the law. The same law that puts the drug dealer who is caught in prison empowers another drug dealer by removing her competition and tightening her control over her territory. As long as there is a demand for drugs, there will be a supply. The problem with criminalizing drugs is that it does nothing to address the demands of addiction. It needs to be recognized that drug use can be curtailed without recourse to imprisonment, that fighting a war on drugs is the surest way to lose all governmental control of drug use.