It’s time for Pennsylvania to do away with an outdated law mandating driver’s license suspensions for non-driving-related drug crimes.

According to the Washington, D.C.-based civil rights advocacy organization Equal Justice Under the Law, 38 states have already repealed or scaled-back similar laws.

Pennsylvania could be next. In a lawsuit filed last week two Philadelphia men — with EJUL’s help — challenged the state law.

According to the lawsuit, about 150,000 Pennsylvanians have lost their licenses because of drug convictions since 2011. The men say they believe thousands of Pennsylvanians are suffering from license suspensions stemming from convictions for crimes like possessing a small amount of marijuana.

The court challenge is not the first time that the efficacy of Pennsylvania’s license suspension law has been called into question.

In late 2016 a multistate report by the Prison Policy Initiative, a criminal justice reform group, published a report that found Pennsylvania suspends more driver’s licenses each year that every state except Virginia, Michigan, Florida and New Jersey.

It would be one thing if the state’s suspension rate was indicative of widespread safety issues on Pennsylvania roads. But that’s not the case according to PPI.

Based on numbers from 2010 — the only data set available for the PPI study — Pennsylvania suspended nearly 20,000 licenses that year for people convicted of possession, sale, manufacturing and delivery of drugs.

And yes, the state does offer a so-called “bread and butter” license that allows people with suspended licenses to drive to and from work. But few people are eligible for those licenses — certainly not those convicted of drug offenses.

Last year legislators in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives seemed poised to change that. Two separate bills were introduced that would allow people convicted of non-driving crimes to keep their licenses.

House Bill 42 would have ended license suspensions for people convicted of crimes such as theft, purchase of alcohol or tobacco by a minor, or carrying a fake identification card.

A separate bill — House Bill 163 — would have done the same for people convicted of possession, sale or delivery of controlled substances.

Neither bill was ever voted upon in 2017. But we hope lawmakers intend to revisit the issue this year.

Pennsylvania’s law is an outdated and counterproductive throwback to the nation’s “tough on crime” and “war on drugs” era of policy-making. It prioritizes punishment over efficacy and hits the poor and those in communities with little or no access to public transit with penalties often disproportionate to their crimes.

The proverbial cherry on top is the fact that state officials aren’t even paying attention to whether the law works or not. PPI could not obtain more recent numbers for its report because state transportation officials denied a Right to Know request, saying Pennsylvania did not have any records containing the data for which PPI was looking.

In a state hit hard by the opioid epidemic, making the case that drug offenders deserve more leniency is difficult. But if the state’s path forward on addiction focuses on compassion and treatment, it makes little sense to leave this draconian law in place.

No one wants to enable drug dealers to continue running their operations after they have been arrested and charged. But lawmakers should be able to easily produce a more effective and nuanced statute.