As Democratic presidential hopefuls crisscrossed New Hampshire in preparation for the state’s Jan. 27 primary, members of Wesleyan’s Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) chapter had a chance to meet with the candidates.
At the second New England College Conference in Manchester, N.H., which took place from January 6-10, 150 national SSDP members and 1,000 other college students met with and questioned most of the Democratic presidential hopefuls about their policies regarding youth and education issues.
SSDP attended the conference with the specific goal of questioning the candidates about the 1998 Higher Education Act (HEA), which has a provision that denies federal financial aid to students with a drug conviction.
“You can get your aid back if you do a rehab program, but if people are on financial they probably can’t pay for a rehab program,” said SSDP member Mary Beth Hickox-Howard ’04. “In theory it’s not supposed to deny aid permanentl—in practice it kind of is.”
The conference, which is organized by New England College in Henniker, N.H., is designed to give college students a chance to speak to all presidential candidates running in an election year. Though President Bush was not present, the conference is intended to bring candidates from both parties.
Three candidates, Wesley Clark, Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, supported the repeal of the HEA’s drug provision. Joseph Lieberman, Carol Moseley Braun and Richard Gephardt, who were in the race at the time, also expressed support. Kerry supported a partial repeal and John Edwards did not take a stand on the issue.
“We got pretty much every democratic presidential candidate to support the repeal of the drug provision of the HEA, which is an amazing task,” said Zakia Henderson-Brown ’06, who also attended the conference. “And it only happened because of great strategic techniques from SSDP national.”
“[SSDP] did a really god job of giving you materials and telling you how to frame the question so it would at least cost the candidate something if they answered that they supported the HEA,” Hickcox-Howard said.
A sample question given to the students for Howard Dean, for example, read, “You’ve said that you are ‘committed to keeping the doors of higher education open to all who want to pass through them.’ Does this mean that a Dean Administration would likewise be committed to repealing the harmful provision of the Higher Education Act which closes those doors to tens of thousands of students every year by excluding those with drug convictions from receiving federal financial aid to attend college?”
SSDP attendees considered their efforts to spread understanding about the HEA a success.
“I think [the conference] did a very good job of putting drug war reform as a youth issue,” Hickcox-Howard said. “I think that [SSDP] used the conference very effectively. They also showed that they were extremely well organized and got taken more seriously than they might have been. A lot of people hear students for a sensible drug policy and what they hear is college students for drug users. They don’t take seriously the idea that there’s more to drug war reform than ‘we want to do drugs.’ ”
Unfortunately, other members of the group felt their reception by other students was less positive.
“Many of them seemed skeptical or just plain ignorant about the drug policy change that we were advocating and we didn’t get to engage in enough real discussion with them,” Henderson-Brown said. “I’d say that we were generally received poorly by most of the other college kids, which was unfortunate.”
At the same time as the larger college conference, SSDP held its own national conference with the 150 attendees. Dennis Kucinich was the only presidential candidate to attend the SSDP function.
“Kucinich is much more dedicated than everybody else,” Hickcox-Howard said. “He’s very publicly opposed to not just the HEA but most of the war on drugs. He talked about it in terms usually about it being a war on minorities and the poor.”
Hickcox-Howard and Henderson-Brown both noted that the HEA affects minorities more than any other group.
“People who get convicted of drug use are disproportionately minorities,” Hickcox-Howard said. “Even though the percentage of people who use drugs is the same across most racial and ethnic groups, the percentage of people who get drug convictions is a very different.”
“I was the single black person out of about 150 SSDP members, which is pretty unsettling considering the fact that the drug war affects primarily people of color,” Henderson-Brown said. “I am aware however, that there is a stigma surrounding drugs in communities of color that has traditionally thwarted the advocacy of drug reform.”
Having been a member of SSDP since her freshman year, Hickcox-Howard was impressed with the conference’s turnout.
“It was really incredible to see how far the movement has come just in the four years I’ve been at Wesleyan,” she said. “We had 150, the largest delegation there.”
Other conference attendees from the Wesleyan chapter were Ethna Riley ’06, Riley’s brother Kieran Riley, Kate Piper ’05 and Middletown resident Dmitri D’Allessandro.
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