THE DRUG, NOT ITS FORM

Blow, snow, star dust, coke.

Crack.

Whether whacked up on a mirror and snorted through a rolled-up dollar
bill or cut with baking soda into rocks for smoking, it's cocaine -
an addictive, illegal drug by any name. However delivered, it's not
something we would wish for our kids, family or even our worst enemies.

Yet Congress, proving again that good intentions can yield bad
policy, passed with great fanfare the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act (and
reinforced it with a 1988 measure) that effectively separated powder
and crack cocaine, with different punishments for possession.

Remember the times. The Boston Celtics had lost their No. 1 draft
pick, Len Bias, to a drug overdose, with crack believed -
incorrectly, it turns out - to be the cause. Crack had become the
devil of the day, "a plague on our inner cities" leading to "crack
babies" born to addicted mothers.

Murder rates spiked in many of the nation's largest cities, Dallas
included. Crack was to blame.

Lawmakers couldn't trip over one another fast enough to sound tough
on crime. Sen. Joe Biden helped shepherd the 1986 and 1988 drug
bills, which enshrined five- and 10-year minimum sentences for
amounts of crack that would rate a "nothing here" on the powder
cocaine scale. The 100-to-1 ratio effectively pushed crack beyond
even heroin as a ticket to prison.

Almost immediately, this did not make sense to many judges, cops and
drug counselors. (In today's context, it would be like instituting
far harsher sentences for "cheese" dealers than someone caught with a
like amount of pure black-tar heroin.)

Whatever the intent, the result has been a dramatic racial imbalance
in federal sentencing. Blacks make up more than eight of 10 federal
prisoners sentenced for crack but only about a quarter of those
imprisoned for powder cocaine, mostly because of out-of-kilter
punishments for the "inner-city drug" than for the same drug in a
different form.

Even Mr. Biden has seen the light. Now a presidential candidate, he
has proposed legislation that would eliminate this sentencing
disparity. He would build on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which
lowered the federal guidelines for crack offenders as of Nov. 1.

What's needed is to make those new guidelines retroactive, affecting
an estimated 19,500 federal prisoners. They were sent away under laws
that, if they ever made sense, do not today. Simple fairness should
guide Congress' hand.