CRACKED JUSTICE

Absurd, Racist Disparities In Drug Sentencing

Cocaine is a fine white powder that, when injected, inhaled or
smoked, causes a euphoric high for about 30 minutes.

A 25 to 150 milligram dose usually produces the desired effect.

The street price of cocaine, after its high of $500 per gram in the
early 1980s, has fluctuated between $120 and $190 per gram for the
last dozen years, so one "hit" of powder cocaine costs the user
between $3 and $28, depending on dosage and purity.

Crack is a cocaine spinoff.

Cocaine is "cooked" with ammonia or baking soda and water to separate
the powder's salts from its purer cocaine "base." Little rocks are
created that can then be smoked.

As the rocks are smoked, they make the tiny crackling sound that
gives the drug its nickname. It takes about one gram of powder
cocaine to produce a 900 milligram rock of crack.

The rock usually is broken into smaller pieces. A 100 milligram rock,
which costs from $10 to $25, can produce one, maybe two good
inhalations. When smoked, it produces a much faster, more intense
high than when using cocaine, because it goes straight into the lungs.

But the high is much briefer, too -- five, 10 minutes, tops. Crack
became popular in the 1980s because of its rapid effects and its
illusion of cheapness.

In fact, taking the midrange street-price, the same amount of crack
is slightly more expensive than an equal amount of cocaine, and
produces one-third the length of the high. Only the intensity is in
crack's favor.

Those details are relevant because they help illuminate, but not
explain, the federal government's senseless, racist laws regarding
cocaine and crack users.

A user arrested and convicted for possessing at least 500 grams of
cocaine will face an automatic five-year prison sentence. For a crack
user, the automatic five-year sentence is triggered from possession
of just 5 grams of crack. (The average crack-related federal sentence
is actually just under 11 years -- longer than the 79-month average
federal sentence for rape.) Why the disparity?

Here's another illuminating fact: As of 2002, 64 percent of crack
users were black or Hispanic. Just 34 percent were white.

Among powder cocaine users, just 33 percent were black, 16 percent
Hispanic, and 48 percent white.

The race-based disparity could not be more obvious when it comes to
sentencing. But so go the inanities of the "war on drugs." They make
you wonder who's really high on what.

Senseless crack and cocaine federal sentencing guidelines date back
to 1986, following several years of press and politicians
sensationalizing a crack "epidemic." There were stories of "crack
babies" born to mothers abusing the drug (babies born to
drug-addicted mothers always have been a problem, but the effects of
poverty, malnutrition, alcohol and tobacco smoking during pregnancy
exert a far greater medical and social toll on babies than crack).
There were tales of crack's wildly addictive nature.

There still are, as federal government propaganda claims crack
deserves stricter punishment because it's more addictive than cocaine.

Yet the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a federal agency, puts the
number of crack users (not addicts) at about 567,000, and the number
of cocaine users at almost four times that. Crack or cocaine
addiction among high school students is negligible. Still, the
hysteria carries on, with occasional reality checks.

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court declared federal sentencing
guidelines unconstitutional. The mandatory version of the guidelines
had a devastating effect on first-time drug offenders.

From 2005 on, the guidelines only could be used on an advisory basis.

Killed, too, was the so-called Feeney Amendment -- a draconian
measure by U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Orlando, that forbade judges from
reducing sentences in some cases. But the Supreme Court did not
address the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences.

Nor did it eliminate still pernicious segments of the Feeney
Amendment, including a requirement that judges' sentences,
accompanied by judges' names, be reported to Congress and the
Attorney General, thus opening the door to intimidation of the judiciary.

On all these counts, Congress has corrective work to do -- both to
fix an unjust disparity and an unjust sentencing law, and to dispel
the kind of drug-war myths that perpetuate the absurd.