Every year the lives of nearly 30,000 Texas citizens are permanently scarred by cocaine convictions. If the cocaine itself did not ruin the lives of these people, Governor Bush assures the punishment will. In 1997, Bush signed into law a measure that toughened penalties for people convicted of selling or possessing less than one gram of cocaine. If George W. Bush intends to apply the same draconian Texas drug policy to the national arena, that number will inflate an already bloated national prison and court system. The drug war in general has been an immoral political bastion of personal destruction, claiming 1,583,600 arrests in 1997 alone.
Prisons are overcrowded and prison budgets now exceed educational funding in some states.
That is because, at least in terms of the current standards for drug war justice, he never paid for his crimes. If George W. Bush is elected president, the drug war will likely plow through the lives of millions of additional Americans. In October of 1998, Bill Clinton signed into law the Higher Education Act. This act included a provision that will revoke or delay a student's federal financial aid or work assistance if a student is convicted of a drug offense, regardless of how minor the offense is. Add to that the denial of an education to a population that can benefit the most from it and you have a serious social catastrophe in the works.