DRUG LAW HAS UNINTENDED EFFECT ON WOULD-BE COLLEGE STUDENTS

NEW YORK - She was thrown out of her home by age 13, spent her teenage years sleeping on subway trains and rotting piers, and still managed to get her general equivalency diploma.

So Laura Melendez figured she had kept her nose pretty clean.

Sure, there had been a few arrests for smoking marijuana, but after an entire adolescence spent on the streets, with far more visits by the police than by her parents, what did those offenses really amount to?

"It means I'll be denied an education," said Melendez, now 22 and applying to college.

If Melendez had been an armed robber, a rapist or even a murderer, she would not be in the same predicament.  Once out of prison, she would have been entitled to government grants and loans, no questions asked.

But under a contentious provision of federal law, tens of thousands of would-be college students have been denied financial aid because of drug offenses, even though the crimes may had been committed long ago and the sentences already served.

"It is absurd on the face of it," said Rep.  Mark Souder, an Indiana Republican.

Souder, who wrote the law, says the Clinton and Bush administrations have turned it on its head, taking a penalty meant to discourage current students from experimenting with drugs and using it to punish people trying to get their lives back on track.

"I am an evangelic Christian who believes in repentance, so why would I have supported that?" he said.  "Why would any of us in Congress?"

The aid prohibition has been a sore point since its enactment in 1998, inciting debate and recriminations all around.  Members of Congress have accused the Clinton and Bush administrations of distorting the law's intent.

The Department of Education has fired back, saying that Congress handed it a vague and sloppy law - one referring simply to "a student who has been convicted" of a drug offense - that the department is faithfully enforcing.

Some members of Congress say they are pushing to rewrite the law.  For the first time since the prohibition took effect, the president's budget includes a commitment to revise it - not to throw it out, but to narrow its scope so that students like Melendez would get a second chance.

"It would really take a lot off my mind," she said.  "I need to go to school.  I can't just leave it like this."