FIVE MYTHS PREVAIL ABOUT CRACK COCAINE

Should judges have the discretion to depart from severe sentencing
guidelines if they lead to unjust results? The Supreme Court wrestled
with this question Oct. 2 during oral arguments in a
crack-relatedcase, Kimbrough v. United States . The case had
percolated up through the lower courts because the trial judge refused
to impose a required sentence he found deeply unfair.

At the peak of the panic over crack cocaine in the mid-1980s, Congress
passed a rash of laws requiring longer prison sentences. One such law
created a 100-to-1 disparity between crack and cocaine offenses. You
have to get caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine -- but only five
grams of crack cocaine -- to get a mandatory minimum sentence of five
years.

Crack is often used in impoverished inner cities, and police focus
their surveillance efforts there. The result? Racially discriminatory
sentencing that has packed prisons with African Americans. Many state
and district court judges agree that the disparity is unfair, and only
13 of the 50 states still legally distinguish between crack and
cocaine. In fact, the 20-year-old crack laws are based on myths:

1.Crack is different from cocaine.

When the crack scare began in the mid-1980s, politicians and the media
outdid each other with horror stories about this new chemical
boogeyman. They spoke as if crack were a completely different drug
from cocaine, but that is a pharmacological fallacy. Crack is simply
the base form of cocaine hydrochloride powder that is smoked. Cocaine
is crack snorted in powder form. The only difference is that smoking
delivers more cocaine to the brain faster, just as vodka will get you
drunk faster than wine. Smoking crack is merely an intense new way to
ingest an old drug. Even the director of the National Institute on
Drug Abuse testified in 2006 that the "pharmacological effects of
cocaine are the same, regardless of whether it is in the form of
cocaine hydrochloride [powder] or crack cocaine."

2. Crack is instantly and inevitably addicting.

Drug-control officials justified the new laws by claiming that crack
was "the most addictive substance ever known." Of course, this had
been said of other drugs in earlier drug scares, beginning with the
temperance crusade against alcohol. Still, experts and ex-addicts
agree that crack cocaine produces a powerful rush and is easy to
abuse; many users have binged on it compulsively and done themselves
serious harm.

But the great majority of people who try crack do not continue to use
it. For 20 years, the government's National Survey on Drug Use and
Health has found that about 80 percent of those who have ever tried
crack had not used it in the past year. And a recent study in the
Journal of the American Medical Association showed that crack cocaine
is not significantly more addictive than powder cocaine.

3. The "plague" of crack use spread quickly into all sectors of
society.

This never happened. Whatever its allures, crack use never spread very
far into suburban high schools, college campuses or the broad working
and middle classes. Crack use remains concentrated in a small slice of
the most vulnerable part of the population: marginalized poor people.

When this mode of ingesting cocaine first appeared among wealthy Wall
Streeters, professional athletes, rock stars and Hollywood types, it
was called freebasing. When some of them got into trouble doing it,
treatment programs were expanded. But when the same practice began to
appear in ghettos and barrios under the street name crack, it led to
an imprisonment wave. In fact, its use among what was already depicted
as a "dangerous class" is part of the reason that crack was seen as
especially dangerous.

4. Crack is the direct cause of violent crime.

Politicians repeatedly cited the association between crack and crime
to justify Draconian laws. It is true that many crack abusers have
committed crimes. At first, everyone assumed that this crack-crime
link stemmed from the addict's craving for crack's potent high, but it
turns out that the chain of causality is more complex. Studies of New
York police records funded by the Department of Justice showed that
most "crack-related homicides" had to do with the tinderbox context in
which crack was sold: high unemployment, desperate poverty, hugely
profitable illicit drug markets and easily available firearms. Crack
is no longer in the media spotlight, but its use has persisted at
nearly the levels of 20 years ago; meanwhile, violent crime has
declined dramatically for a decade.

5. Harsh sentences for crack are necessary to deter "serious" and
"major traffickers."

This was what Congress claimed when it passed the laws, but it defined
"serious" trafficking as five grams -- less than one-sixth of an
ounce. U.S. Sentencing Commission figures have long shown that more
than three-fourths of those snagged are merely users and low-level
sellers caught with tiny amounts. And they are overwhelmingly African
Americans. Perversely, small-time sellers serve up to five times
longer in prison than the cocaine-powder dealers caught with the same
weight, who may well have supplied them.

These laws have helped increase the number of drug offenders in U.S.
prisons nearly ninefold, from about 50,000 when President Ronald
Reagan took office in 1981 to more than 450,000 today. They have
helped triple the prison population and given the United States the
highest rate of incarceration in the world. This costs U.S. taxpayers
billions each year, but it has never made much of a dent in our most
serious drug problems.

We cannot incarcerate our way to a "drug-free society."

Craig Reinarman is a professor of sociology at the University of California
at Santa Cruz and co-author of "Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social
Justice."