SNAP, CRACKLE, & POP

How Heat, Water, And Baking Soda Turn 5 Grams Of Cocaine Into A Five-year
Prison Sentence.

The trap was set for Duane Edwards in the parking lot of a laundromat at
Pennsylvania Avenue and Carpenter Street SE, on the east side of the
Anacostia River. Federal undercover agents watched as he drove in with his
friend Vonda Dortch, whom they had seen there before. She got out while
Edwards, a decorated veteran of the Persian Gulf War, waited in his
mother's charcoal-gray Geo.

It was the middle of the afternoon on a warm day in June 1995. Dortch got
into a waiting car—an undercover police car, as it turned out. Unaware of
the danger, she handed over about 125 grams of crack cocaine for $3,400,
and then she got back in the car with Edwards.

The next thing the pair knew, they were surrounded by marked and unmarked
police cruisers. Edwards made a run for it, peeling away at high speed. But
he got only a few blocks before he ditched the car and the money. Police
caught him after a foot chase. In the center console of the Geo, they found
another 62 grams of crack.

So went another routine drug bust in the District: A total of 187 grams of
crack off the street, and a 25-year-old black man with no prior criminal
record and no particular stake in any big drug cartel sentenced to the
10-year federal minimum sentence in Beckley, W.Va. (Dortch, charged with a
lesser crime, drew a shorter sentence.)

"They classified him as a carrier," says his mother, Burndell McNeal, a
retired government worker who lives in Fort Washington, Md. "It's just made
him harder and bitter, feeling like there's no justice in the system."

Not that Edwards didn't have a shot at justice. Caught up in the federal
courts, where sentences for selling crack are 100 times harsher than they
are for the same amounts of powder cocaine, Edwards' case attracted the
attention of National Bar Association Criminal Law Section Chair John
Floyd, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree, and criminal-law
superstar Johnnie Cochran, of O.J. Simpson fame. Arguing that the
crack/powder sentencing disparity skews overwhelmingly against
African-Americans, who make up the vast majority of the nation's crack
users, the trio took on Edwards' case in 1996 and appealed it all the way
to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court, however, refused to hear the case.

The implication was that the fate of Edwards, and legions of drug
defendants like him, must rest with the legislature. The problem, as
Edwards' mother is quick to point out, is that Congress started the
sentencing disparities and has shown no sign of willingness to change them
any time soon. "I've written to Congress. I've written to everybody," says
McNeal. "They won't do anything."

Eric E. Sterling was working as a staff attorney for the House Judiciary
Subcommittee on Crime in June 1986, when University of Maryland basketball
star Len Bias overdosed on cocaine and died. It was a slow news week, and
the political reaction was massive. With backing from a broad political
coalition that stretched from archconservative Georgia Republican Newt
Gingrich to archliberal New York Democrat Charles B. Rangel, an
election-year drug bill gave congressional crack warriors just about
everything they wanted—except a proposed death penalty for drug kingpins.

Sterling, now president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a
D.C.-based think tank, recalls that the 1986 congressional debate on crack
"had a certain auction-at-Sotheby's quality to it, with all the competing
bidders." The upshot was a new sentencing ratio that supercriminalized as
little as 5 grams of crack, putting that amount on a par with 500 grams of
powder cocaine for the mandatory five-year minimum sentence. The same
100-to-1 ratio made selling 50 grams of crack a 10-year felony, the
equivalent of selling 5,000 grams (that's 5 kilos) of powder cocaine. The
imbalance was obvious, but it addressed a public outcry.

And it had a potent political side effect: The 5-gram threshold was
something even a small-town member of Congress could take home and put to use.

In practice, however, only about 5 percent of crack dealers convicted in
federal courts nationwide can be considered "high-level dealers," according
to a 1995 U.S. Sentencing Commission report. More than half of the other
defendants are street-level dealers, go-betweens, and carriers—people like
Edwards.

That, according to Sterling and others, is where the huge racial disparity
comes into play. Black people, the commission found, accounted for 85
percent of those convicted in federal courts for selling crack. When the
crime was selling powder cocaine, blacks dropped to only 31 percent of the
prison-bound multitudes.

The U.S. Attorney's Office doesn't keep race statistics for crack
convictions in D.C. Superior Court. The city's own laws contain no
sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, but D.C.'s
prosecutors have discretion to bring federal charges against people caught
with enough contraband to draw the five- or 10-year federal minimum
sentence. And the vast majority of D.C. defendants in that position are black.

Recognizing how the sentencing disparity played out in racial terms, the
U.S. Sentencing Commission recommended in 1995—the year Edwards was
arrested—that sentencing for crack- and powder-cocaine crimes be equalized.
Edwards' lawyers even cited the commission's findings in their appeal. But
Congress was no more moved than the Supreme Court would be; it voted down
the change. Prison disturbances erupted across the country.

The sentencing commission came back in 1997 with a more modest proposal, to
narrow the sentencing disparity for crack from 100 to 1, to 5 to 1. It
would do so by increasing the amount of crack and reducing the amount of
powder cocaine needed to trigger a five-year sentence. In response,
President Clinton, backed by Attorney General Janet Reno and Gen. Barry R.
McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, endorsed
a plan that would reduce the disparity to 10 to 1. That reduced ratio, the
president said, would "continue to reflect that crack is a more harmful
form of cocaine."

Once again, though, Congress was unmoved.

The latest salvo in the ongoing debate came last year, when congressional
Republicans proposed reducing the disparity by merely lowering the amount
of powder cocaine required for a five-year sentence from 500 grams to 50
grams. They argued that this change would balance the scales of justice
without softening the penalties for crack. Liberal Democrats countered that
it would do nothing except send even more black offenders to prison. The
proposal was dropped by the Senate last November.

The legal distinction certainly isn't borne out in the chemistry: Powder
cocaine and crack cocaine are pharmacologically indistinct. It's only the
medium that changes, with the introduction of baking soda and water.

But the change is significant. There's nothing inherently insidious about
baking soda and water, but mixing them with powder cocaine produces
smokable rocks, which deliver cocaine directly to the oxygen-rich blood of
the lungs. No dollar bills and messy mucous membranes to fuss with. The
stuff goes straight into the bloodstream and takes the A Train to the
brain, where it packs a hefty, immediate, and gratifying wallop.

If the distance between coke and crack is short—the transformation can be
done with a plate and a kitchen microwave—the sociological journey is
longer: from suburbs to city and from yuppie rec room to gangsta street
corner. As in cities elsewhere, crack in D.C. has developed into an elixir
with a fairly narrow marketing demographic: generally poor, young, and black.

"It's hard to document, but crack is perceived as a black drug," says Marc
Mauer, of the Sentencing Project, a Washington criminal-justice-reform
group. "If it had been whites doing it, I think there would be a lot more
deliberation about the sentences."

While the sentencing disparities have sometimes been justified in the name
of protecting the black community, many—such as Georgia Dickens, director
of the STEPUP Foundation of Greater Washington, D.C.—worry about their
effect on black youth. "Going to jail isn't going to do them any good," she
says.

But going to jail, it seems, is the price black men in the city pay for
using a poor man's drug with a poor man's dynamic. Mauer notes that, as
addictive as crack has proved to be, the most pernicious social aspects of
the drug—the shootings, the turf wars, and so on—can be attributed as much
to the limited resources of the people who use it as to the drug itself:
"If you're a corporate lawyer doing coke and you need money for your
supply, you've got the means to get [the money] legally and above board."

To add to the misery, the 100-to-1 sentencing lingers on. "It's gone too
far," says McNeal. "People who made one mistake go to prison for a long,
long time. It's just absolutely unnecessary."