On Wednesday, July 15, the Rotary Club of Lancaster, PA hosted Kris Krane as the speaker for their weekly luncheon. Krane is the Executive Director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), an organization that works to mobilize college students to challenge existing punitive drug policies, on both the campus level and the government level.

Early in his presentation, Krane described the core conviction that drives the work of SSDP: “We feel that drugs should be treated as a public health issue, rather than just a criminal justice issue, and that law enforcement should be used to treat the collateral consequences of the drug use—such as driving while intoxicated or violence while under the influence—rather than the primary focus of…drug control.”

During Krane’s presentation, he laid out three contemporary issues of particular concern to his organization.

The first issue, which in 1998 served as the catalyst for SSDP, was the inclusion of the “Aid Elimination Penalty” associated with the Federal Higher Education Act Reauthorization Bill. Krane explained that this law denies eligibility for academic financial aid to any student with a past drug conviction: “This government cannot legally ask a student about a conviction for rape, murder, assault, or any other crime; yet any student busted for even a simple possession of marijuana automatically loses their financial aid eligibility.” This penalty has barred over 200,000 people from student aid since it was officially enacted in 2000. Krane noted that this penalty works counter-productively because, statistically speaking, people with a college education are far less likely to have problems with drugs and alcohol.

The second issue discussed by Krane was student drug testing. In the last decade, the Federal government has expanded the freedoms and incentives for school districts to engage random drug testing procedures. For those students who test positive, the repercussion is often exclusion from after-school activities. As Krane described it, this policy—like the Aid Elimination Penalty—is often counter-productive, given that after school activities can keep students busy during the key hours in which teen drug use is proven to most frequently occur (between 3 and 6 P.M.)

The third issue of concern was the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s youth anti-drug media campaign, into which the Federal Government has poured $1.6 billion since 1998. Krane asserted that these ads serve as “little more than a joke” for today’s teenagers, citing a long-term study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse that revealed that these ads can, in fact, increase the likelihood of teenagers to use drugs.

During the closing Q&A session, one Rotary Club member asked Krane how he would ideally like to see the United States handle its drug policy. Krane responded by qualifying that he could not lay out one particular plan, because so many tenable models have been proposed. Venturing an ideal description, he said that first, different drugs would have to be handled differently; a substance like marijuana, with effects not far from those of alcohol or tobacco, should be regulated far less than a substance such as heroine. For more dangerous drugs, Krane envisioned that distribution could be handled in a highly-regulated, medical fashion—requiring prescriptions, clean needles, etc.

Much of what Krane proposed could be pigeonholed as “legalization”; however, Krane was wary of employing such an ambiguous term: “What does ‘legal’ mean? Tomatoes are legal, alcohol is legal, tobacco is legal; uranium is legal, but you can’t just go into the store and buy it!”

For more information on Students for Sensible Drug Policy, please click here.