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What are they smoking?

Tobacco, aspirin and caffeine are drugs that will not deny you your Pell Grant.

Marijuana, on the other hand, is a "crime." It is circular reasoning at best, oppression at worst - which is the majority of the time. This is reasoning that, in many cases, delivers mandatory sentences of 10 years minimum (having to serve 8.5 of those) for first-time possession.

But the issue here does not revolve around arrests or prison sentences. It deals with a student's basic right to financial aid, despite their use of "illegal" drugs.

A ruling by the U.S. Department of Education last Thursday prohibits students convicted of any drug-related crime from receiving federal financial aid. The regulation makes students ineligible for student loans, Pell Grants and other types of federal aid.

Despite the fact that marijuana use becomes more prevalent and more socially acceptable in this country every day, the Education department decided to invoke its morals on the nation's college students.

It's a blatant, shocking denial of a less-than-wealthy student's basic right to an education.

As Abraham Lincoln said, "A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." Most Americans passively accept this thievery of our freedom, which is questionable for many reasons, reeking of corporate and governmental intervention in its citizens' private lives.

We spend $40 billion and make 1,350,000 arrests a year in the "War on Drugs" which began as a racist attack against "heathen" Chinese opium-smokers.

Attacks on marijuana began in 1930 when the Treasury Department created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Hearst newspapers printed anti-hemp stories, supported by the DuPont corporation, which patented new procedures for making paper out of wood pulp and nylon from coal tar and petroleum products. These newspaper magnates opposed machinery for efficient hemp production, which would make its paper and textiles a better and cheaper alternative to paper. The forests used by the textiles were owned by Hearst, who promptly printed headlines such as "New dope lure, marijuana, has many victims," and "Marijuana makes fiends of boys in 30 days."

Hearst even got Anslinger -buddy and morphine supplier to Senator Joseph McCarthy - to publish that "If ... Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marijuana he would drop dead of fright," and that, "(Marijuana) is reducing thousands of boys to criminal insanity."

Congress reviewed the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937. When the bill was voted on, somebody asked if the American Medical Association had given their opinion. Representative Vinson of Anslinger's committee lied. "Yes we have ... and they are in complete agreement." The bill passed; Anslinger prosecuted over 3,000 doctors in the next year and a half.

In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act passed. To quote McWilliams again, "Under this law a bureaucrat - usually not elected - decides whether or not a substance is dangerous and how dangerous that substance is. People are in jail now because they did something an administrator declared was wrong."

Marijuana prohibition is not an activity that the government should be involved in when the user is of adult age. There is no criminal and no victim. It is a consensual activity that the government has no right to ban, especially under the guise of it being harmful to those who partake of it.

And it certainly does not excuse the Education department forcing its morals down the throats of innocent students who probably did nothing more than smoke a joint.

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