SENATE VOTES TO MAKE CRACK COCAINE LAW EVEN MORE UNFAIR

THE U.S. Senate has responded to one of the grand inequities in the
nation's drug laws. Its solution: compound the problem.

Under federal law, possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine invoked the same
sentence as possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine: 5 years in prison
without parole.

Civil rights groups have complained for years of a racial bias in the
disparity, since crack cocaine is predominantly an inner city drug. Numbers
backed the argument: Last year, less than a third of the defendants in
powder cocaine convictions were black, while 85 percent of the defendants
in crack cocaine cases were African-Americans.

The answer, said the White House and the U.S. Sentencing Commission, was to
raise the minimum amount of crack bringing on the 5-year sentence. Instead,
the Senate, on a 50-49 vote, did the opposite. It reduced the amount of
power cocaine for the 5-year sentence from 500 grams to 50 grams.

The Bureau of Prisons estimates the new law would add 9,163 federal inmates
over the next decade. A disproportionate number of these, too, would be
minorities.

If the goal is consistency, the Senate has achieved it. Imprisoning more
drug users and small-time sellers would be consistent with a failed
national drug policy that Congress has fashioned.