"Dear Representative John Carter,
As your constituent, I'm writing to urge you to make sure that the penalty that strips financial aid from college students with drug convictions is repealed through the Higher Education Act reauthorization.
I have a child who is a student at Baylor. A drug conviction hurts those students most in need and it is adding insult to injury to take away student aid for a safer choice, cannabis. Drug abuse is a medical problem not a criminal activity. If we allow 18 year olds to join the military and possibly die protecting freedom then they should be free to have a drink in peace, legally.
I taught my children that their bodies are the temples of their souls. However, when my children became young adults I told them the truth about drugs. Including that marijuana or cannabis is a safer health choice in a recreational drug but the collateral damage from arrest can be devastating and life long.
Truth, trust and reason encourage open communications between youth, parents and faculties. Over a thousand people die each day due to tobacco use! Close to 300 a day die from prescribed pharmaceuticals. The tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceuticals gangs deal drugs that kill many more annually than all illicit drugs. We tolerate their salesmen! Alcohol makes domestic violence 8xs more likely; marijuana does not according to a 2003 study. There is a link between pharmaceutical psychotropic drugs and violence including school violence!
Since the Aid Elimination Penalty was added as an amendment to HEA in 1998, more than 200,000 aspiring students have been blocked access to educational assistance, often for relatively minor offenses such as possession of small amounts of marijuana. While the penalty is supposed to keep young people away from drugs, it actually does the opposite by kicking at-risk students out of school. But blocking access to education doesn't just hurt the students directly impacted; it has harmful implications for society as a whole.
College graduates are much more likely to become successful taxpaying citizens, while those who are kicked out of school are more likely to abuse drugs, become costly drains on the criminal justice system, and rely on expensive government assistance programs. Furthermore, since students already have to make good academic progress to receive financial aid, the penalty only affects hardworking students who are doing well in their classes. As for students who are causing problems and disrupting the learning process for others, college administrators already have the authority to expel them, and judges have long had the ability to revoke student aid from people with drug convictions on a case-by-case basis.
Numerous addiction recovery, criminal justice, religious, and other leaders have insisted that education is one of the best means to reduce crime and drug abuse, and Congress's own Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance recommended removing the drug conviction question from the aid application, calling it "irrelevant" to eligibility.
Fortunately, this year's HEA reauthorization process presents a great opportunity to get rid of the harmful and unfair penalty once and for all. Please help tens of thousands of hardworking and determined individuals get back into school and on the path to success by making sure that the HEA bill includes language repealing the aid elimination penalty. Thanks for your attention to this important issue. "
Monday, October 22, 2007
Colleen's heartfelt plea to stop the Drug War draft
--Colleen McCool Minter
Tell Congress to help other people like Colleen: http://capwiz.com/mobilize//issues/alert/?alertid=10419331
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6 comments:
Colleen what an excellent letter. Bless you for having the courage to inform your child about the relative innocuousness of cannabis and the draconian penalties for its possession. May these absurd laws be immediately reformed!
I am a college student who sits next to another student who told me he smoked pot every day before the lecture in our biology class. Every day my classmate comes into the class and his eyes are really red and glassy. By the time the professor is half way through the lecture my classmate is staring out the window and by the end of the lecture his head is down on his desk and sometimes I have to wake him up when the class is over. After class he usually asks me what the professor talked about and asks me if he can copy my notes from the day's class. I'm getting a little tired of giving him my notes but I realize he has the right to smoke weed whenever he wants wherever he wants. It's a basic right, I think. I think coming to class stoned is just part of going to college and learning to expand one's horizons so I help him with notes and test answers and stuff. He told me that he's on financial aid and that he can make a little extra money for books and food by selling some of his stash to other students. He said that he can make almost as much money selling pot to other students as he gets in state aid. I told him that that was pretty cool and that I might try to make some extra money also. He said that he would show me how to sell some of the stuff he gets. I think that using pot and hash in college should be legal because as far as I can see it doesn't hurt anything and the experience of experimenting with drugs like pot and hash is good because it expands your mind and your horizons.
To Anonymous,
Your friend in class is obviously not coping with his pot use very well. He shows the classic symptoms of a zoned out pot head. Do you really think you are doing him a favor by giving him your notes? Yeah, he may slide trough and get his degree, but if he continues the same behavior when he has to perform in the job market he will not be able to hold a steady job, and will be persona non grata at almost any responsible establishment. Insurance ststistics show that workers who abuse drugs have a much higher incidence of job related accidents and that's why a great percentage of employers have pre-employment drug screening and almost all insurers require a drug screen after a job injury or accident. Drug users have a higher rate of absenteeism and are a liability to any employer. The fact is that your pot dealing and pot smoking friend is in class in body only.......his mind is on the way out. Do him a favor. Don't give him your notes. Let him fail now while he's young enough to recover.
Also to Anonymous,
I do not think that it is the right of every individual to be high "whenever" they want. At home, in the evenings, on weekends it may be fine but at times when one is expected to be alert and attentive i.e. work, school, while driving, then sobriety is needed. Financial aid is money that the public provides for individuals and the public has a right to expect that the individual recieving such aid should use it to its best advantage. Your classmate is wasting his time and possibly my tax money. All my friends and I smoked pot in college but never before class or when we were studying. Pot is o.k. as a recreational drug but the classroom is not a place for recreation. This is yet another reason to legalize pot. Too often, because people who smoke pot are already doing something illegal just by partaking, they fail to impose upon themselves any kind of regulation. Where the law fails to provide intelligent regulation it is up to the individual and society as a whole to apply their own. Would you respect a follow student who came to class drunk? I should hope not. Tell your classmate that if he wants to know what the professor said then he should come to class sober and ready to learn. When he has fullfulled his academic obligations for the day, then is the time for a nice relaxing toke and not before.
I found this blog and entry by reading info from Tutor/Mentoring and Dan Bissel's blog.
I enjoyed reading about the attitudes and beliefs you hold concerning drinking and drugs. I, too, hold similar attitudes.
I firmly believe that children and youth have more options available today than in the past regarding pleasure activities.
Taking care of friends and family is a home grown thing. The student who helped a fellow classmate out is one example of our daily initiatives therein. Fostering such an approach is helpful, overall.
However:
Was the classmate cunningly repeating the same thing everyday, getting high, then coming to class?
Perhaps there was more to the situation than that of face value. Was he hungry? Did he have a decent place to eat and sleep? How about transportation? You see? Pushing a problem onto one category of behavior, drug use, is wrong. There are other principles of behavior at work.
Even if a young person has a near perfect life, and drug useage is the only problematic situation, there are steps one can take to help. I hope everything worked out.
While I don't agree that a college student should come to school high every day I do believe the Aid Elimination Penalty should be overturned. My husband suffers from chronic joint pain and arthritis. He smokes a little bit of marijuana a day for medicinal reasons, I don't smoke it myself but I would rather him do that than be addicted to pharmeceuticals. He works hard at school and has been on the Dean's list and the Scholar's list. Before he went back to school he worked full-time since high school. He was pulled over a few weeks ago and the police found his pipe and his little bit of marijuana on him. Now he is facing losing it all.
He is the type of person this law is hurting. Someone who is trying to better their education and be a good citizen to society.
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