That nonanswer was good enough to get Bush into the White House, but it wouldn't be good enough to get him a student loan under his administration's higher education policy. On Tuesday, the Department of Education announced that it would enforce a law that would deny financial aid to students who answer "yes" -- or refuse to answer at all -- to one simple question: "Have you ever been convicted of selling or possessing drugs?"

Education Department spokeswoman Lindsey Kozberg said the Bush Education Department was just doing its job. "The department is bound to enforce the legislation," she said. "Our interest is in appropriately carrying out the intent of the law."

But regardless of the fairly compromised position of our president on the topic, the law is unfair and unjust -- both because it imposes such severe penalties for all drug offenses, including relatively innocuous recreational drug use, and because it disproportionately punishes poor and African-American youth. Perhaps worst of all is the fact that it actually makes it more difficult for young people who have had scrapes with the law to improve themselves.

"It sends a message of government stupidity," says Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, an organization that works for reform of the nation's drug laws. Sterling claims that by delaying or denying past drug offenders the chance to go to college, the government will reinforce the negative circumstances that lead to drug crimes: lower income potential, unemployment and alienation from society. Sharda Sekaran, associate director of public policy at the Lindesmith Center Drug Policy Foundation, concurs. "It's counterintuitive to suggest that keeping people away from higher education will help stop drug abuse," she said.

The restrictions on financial aid for students with drug records were signed into law in 1998. Former congressman Gerald Solomon, R-N.Y., was the primary sponsor of the policy, which was tacked onto the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the law that governs federal financial aid programs.

But the policy does not enjoy universal support in Congress. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., has led the charge to have the restriction repealed, and has put together a coalition of more than two dozen mostly Democratic representatives to overturn it. On Feb. 28, he introduced H.R. 786, an amendment to the Higher Education Act to repeal the ban, his second effort since the policy went into effect.

The policy does not ban aid to every student with drug convictions. Those who have been convicted of drug crimes as minors don't need to worry about the question. To Howard Simon, spokesman for Partnership for a Drug-Free America, that proves that the law doesn't punish kids for youthful errors. "We're not talking about some 15-year-old who is caught with a joint," Simon said. "It's people who are old enough to understand the consequences."

That's not always the case, counters Jason Ziedenberg, a senior policy analyst with the Justice Policy Institute. Ziedenberg points out that, increasingly, prosecutors are apt to charge juveniles as adults for drug crimes. And, he says, a disproportionate number of those are African-American kids.

Ziedenberg has the numbers to back up his case. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, between 1988 and 1997 the number of juveniles eventually tried as adults for drug-related offenses rose 78 percent. He also points out a study conducted last year by Building Blocks for Youth, an organization that monitors the way the criminal justice system affects minorities. While 59 percent of juveniles formally charged in drug cases were white, only 35 percent of those eventually tried as adults for drug offenses were white. Black juveniles, who made up 39 percent of youngsters charged in drug crimes, made up 63 percent of those charged as adults. "It's certain," Ziedenberg says, "that black and Latino kids will get the worst of this."

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