OHIO SHOULD EQUALIZE COCAINE PENALTIES

It's time to make Ohio's cocaine laws colorblind by taking away the
likelihood that more black criminals than white criminals will be
sentenced to serious prison time for sale or use of cocaine.

When today's drug laws were written, the penalties were determined by
the amount of the drug involved in the crime. And the more powerful,
more addictive nature of crack caused lawmakers to decide they should
punish its use or sale more harshly. A powder-cocaine criminal can
have up to 10 times as much drug as a crack criminal before the two
are punished equally.

But that puts more blacks than whites in prison for drug offenses
because crack is mostly a drug found in poor city neighborhoods. We
see no benevolence in powder cocaine that should cause this more
suburban drug to be one-tenth as illegal as the city drug.

The Ohio Legislature will take another run at equalizing the penalty
by raising the powder penalties to the same level as crack. Sen. Scott
Oelslager of Plain Township is the Ohio Senate's new chairman of the
Judiciary Committee on Criminal Justice, and he favors the
equalization. Oelslager's support is important for the future of this
reform, which Ohio should enact.