The drug war's first generation fights back

A discussion with students and an ACLU lawyer about drugs, race, and financial aid.

DAVID GEST/YH Graham Boyd, ACLU lawyer

On Sat., Dec. 2, student and community activists from around Connecticut gathered at Yale to dis-cuss drug policy and prisons and their racial consequences. African-Americans constitute 13 percent of the U.S. population and 13 percent of drug users, but 55 percent of people convicted of drug offenses. The result of this bias in the war on drugs is a disproportionately large black prison population. Another example of this bias is the drug provision of the Higher Education Act (HEA), which mandates that individuals convicted of a drug-related crime be ineligible for federal financial aid and that applicants check a box on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) stating that they have not been convicted. Among issues raised at the conference were how to combat the drug provision of the HEA, the distinction between drug use and drug abuse, and double standards in drug enforcement. The Herald sat in on a speech by Graham Boyd, an ACLU lawyer who specializes in drug cases, and a discussion that capped the conference. Afterwards, we assembled organizers Luke Bronin, SM '01, Chesa Boudin, TC '03, Alexandra Cox, BK '01, and Adam Ritter, Wesleyan '02, along with Boyd, to ask how these issues affected Yale and how they wanted to begin to organize resistance against them.

Yale Herald: How does what we've talked about for the last hour and a half connect specifically to Yale, and how do you want to mobilize Yale students?

Alexandra Cox: I think that students would stand to lose a lot less if they grouped together in a concerted effort to protest the HEA drug clause.

Graham Boyd: The way to do it on campus would be to start a petition asking people to leave the box for drug convictions on the FAFSA unchecked, with the understanding that nobody would do anything unless the petition received 500 or 1,000 signatures. Yale wouldn't be willing to see hundreds of its students lose financial aid. It's important to remember that Yale provided money to draft resisters who'd lost federal aid. They ought to do the same for conscientious objectors to the HEA.

DAVID GEST/YH Adam Ritter, Wesleyan '03

Adam Ritter: Any action has to come after we've made the HEA a major issue. When you can ask just about any normal student on the Yale campus, "Do you know about the drug provision of the HEA?" and they say "Yes, I do," then we have the potential to do something here. I think when that becomes the case most of them will stand against it. And there are lots of ways to reach this point, so I don't think it will take that long to develop. I think that serious campaigning and some major actions on our part are what it will take. Chesa Boudin: Raise consciousness.

Luke Bronin: Increase awareness on campus.

YH: How do you think you'd like to go about that here and at other universities?

AC: The traditional agenda for dealing with the Higher Education Act says that the way to raise consciousness is to pass around a petition, and people will see this and start to realize that something's seriously wrong.

GB: The issue needs to be put in the clearest terms possible: Congress has enacted a law that prohibits you from getting financial aid if you have a drug conviction. African-Americans constitute 13 percent of the United States' population, and they account for 13 percent of illegal drug use but 55 percent of the total number of people convicted of drug offenses. It's clear that this provision will affect people based upon what race they are. It's urgent that you get rid of this provision.

DAVID GEST/YH Chesa Boudin, TC '03

YH: In addition to the discrimination of the HEA, another point that came up in discussion was the unevenness of drug law enforcement in New Haven. Police look the other way when Yalies use drugs, while they arrest New Haven residents for the same offenses. Is this just blatant racism or is there some other cause? CB: It's racism. It's a perfect example of selective enforcement.

GB: It's not racism, it's racial profiling. It's uneven enforcement in which race is a primary factor. The issue is more complicated than that, but racial differences are a sufficient explanation for why you get the disparities you've just mentioned.

YH: Given the prevalence of marijuana on campus, not just among one subculture but across the Yale population as a whole, do you think that the Administration will ever relax its own drug regulations?

AC: I think that the Administration knows that this is happening, so I don't think forcing them to acknowledge this is an issue.

GB: This is also an issue of law. The federal government requires all universities to have antidrug policies, so they have to make this gesture toward being anti-marijuana.

YH: To what degree does the University tacitly accommodating nonabusive drug use on campus?

DAVID GEST/YH Alexandra Cox, BK '01

CB: I think that they do well for the most part. Yale doesn't want to come down hard on each student in a way that will impact his or her ability to graduate and go on to a high- paying job.

GB: The situation at Yale is far more open than that at, for example, Stanford, where the police on campus are employed by the county. Yale is in many ways fortunate to have a police force that is not only part of the city but is specifically Yale's police force. I think that they police drug laws in much the way that the Berkeley police do—benign neglect to a certain degree.

YH: Don't you think that having two separate forces also reinforces the sense that Yale and New Haven are two distinct places effectively subject to two distinct sets of laws?

AR: This situation exists between many elite colleges and the towns they're in, and it perpetuates something that causes a problem for our activism: Yale students don't feel the effects of the drug war, so they don't feel an obligation to resist it. Lenient enforcement has a lot of obvious benefits for Yale students, but these are people who could have the power to stand up, and they might if they really had been repressed. From the perspective of the drug war, though, this shows one of the HEA's fatal mistakes. It's extending the war's effects to people who hadn't felt them before.

GB: Not really, though. You only get in trouble under the Higher Education Act if you've been convicted of a drug offense. Blacks overwhelmingly do, whites overwhelmingly don't. The fundamental point of the drug war is that we're two countries: we are a country on one hand who are of color, who are of lesser means, who live in urban areas, and they're the people who are the drug war victims. But if you're a Yale student, you get exempted from that. Unless you're black, in which case when you go home you could get caught up in the net. The fundamental premise of using the drug war to divide this country in two is amazingly consistent wherever you look at it.

DAVID GEST/YH Luke Bronin, SM '01

YH: How do you get people at Yale or a similar university to rally against a law that often has no impact on them?

CB: Unlike some other social justice issues, this is one that strikes fairly close to home. We might not be able to imagine going to prison or being connected to somebody who would, but we can all imagine ourselves or a friend losing financial aid. HEA means that the drug war, unlike other prison issues, hits home.

AR: We have to remember, though, that resistance to the drug war needs to be taken to the streets. We have to get into the poor, urban areas where people are most effected by the war as a whole. It's a matter of physically, even metaphysically, breaking through the barriers that most people fail to cross. We have to break down our own inner barriers and get physically into urban areas where people are most effected by the war on drugs and then see what happens—take the message to them by presenting ourselves not as somebody else, not a bunch of elitists sitting around in a room and tape-recording each other, but people who are right there. It's not easy, but it's got to be done on the streets, where change really happens.

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