WHY SOME GET BUSTED AND SOME GO FREE

Drug arrests on the 10 o'clock news tend to show inner-city blacks and
Latinos being led away in handcuffs. But Federal health statistics show
only slight differences in the rates of drug use for whites and people of
color -- and define the typical drug addict as a white male in his 20's who
lives in a suburb where drug busts almost never happen.

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America expects to spend nearly $200
million this year to convince policy makers and affluent Americans that the
drug problem crosses racial, economic and geographic lines. This point
would seem self-evident. But the myth that drug use is confined to the
black inner city will be difficult to dislodge.

The Hartford Courant learned how deep the myth runs when it published a
series in 1992 that examined the lives of drug addicts who supported their
habits through prostitution. Conditioned to think of drug abuse as a
minority problem, some readers were stunned that 70 percent of the
drug-addicted prostitutes shown in the series turned out to be white. Some
doubted that the story was true. The refusal to believe that white heroin
addicts exist was particularly self-deceptive in a state that is almost 90
percent white.

The same stereotypes have been at play for decades along the mid-Atlantic
stretch of Interstate 95, where the presumed link between race and drugs
has led state troopers to stop and search black motorists based on race
alone. The profiling scandal in New Jersey is spreading. Last week Boston
opened a profiling investigation of its own.

The move in Boston was helped along by a Federal judge who sharply cut the
expected sentence for a black man who had been charged with weapons
possession after a random traffic stop. Judge Nancy Gertner chastised the
police, saying that nothing in the man's record or driving conduct
justified them in stopping him.

Turning to the police record, the judge found a host of random stops. She
noted that "African-American motorists are stopped and prosecuted for
traffic stops more than any other citizens" and suggested they were
"imprisoned at a higher rate for these offenses as well." Citing "deep
concerns" about the disparity, the judge gave the man 30 months, when she
could have given him six years.

Statistics from Maryland and New Jersey show that black motorists are about
five times as likely to be stopped on the highway as whites. Even Americans
who disapprove of racial profiling tend to view it as a passing
humiliation, with no broad social import. But criminologists have long
argued that profiling goes well beyond the personal and exerts a
substantial impact on the criminal justice process and the broader social
order as well.

Speaking at a national conference last week, Dr. Dawn Day, an addiction
specialist from the Dogwood Center in Princeton, N.J., drew a connection
between racial profiling of intravenous drug users and the rapid spread of
AIDS in the black community.

The most conservative estimates suggest that white intravenous drug users
outnumber black users by at least 5 to 1. Even so, drug sweeps tend to be
concentrated in inner cities, which are widely viewed as the sole source of
the problem. Dr. Day's calculations, based on Federal data, show 5 arrests
for every 100 white addicts, but 20 arrests for every 100 black addicts.

Unworried about random searches and arrests, many white addicts carry clean
needles so that they can avoid sharing needles and the risk of getting
AIDS. But black addicts know that they are vulnerable to random search and
arrest and often choose not to carry needles. Instead, they share the
needles of strangers, getting AIDS and other blood-borne diseases in the
process. As a consequence, the rate of H.I.V.infection for black drug users
is many times that of whites.

Criminologists have argued for decades that racial profiling plays a
central role in the fact that black Americans make up a disproportionate
part of the prison population. Drug cartels have long since grasped this
point, minimizing the use of non-whites as couriers and using people who
look like mild-mannered suburban housewives whenever possible.

Police departments have historically justified profiling by arguing that it
leads to valid arrests. But the practice also exempts from scrutiny the
vast majority of drug users and couriers who are by definition non-black.
The race-based practice catches some of the guilty, but it violates the
lives of many more innocent people, undermining law-enforcement credibility
in minority neighborhoods. Finally, the myth that drug crime is a "black"
problem, confined to ghettos, allows the culture to deceive itself about
the vast scope of the epidemic.