UNDO THIS LEGACY OF LEN BIAS'S DEATH

When Len Bias, the basketball star, overdosed on cocaine 20 years
ago, Len Bias, the symbol, was born. To many he symbolized the
corruption of college athletics -- stars whose academic performance
is poor, if not irrelevant, but who are essential to bringing in
donations and other revenue. To others, he became the object lesson:
Cocaine is dangerous, don't do it, you can die. For yet others, Bias
symbolizes the danger that arises when a powerful symbol overwhelms
careful judgment about what ought to be the law.

Immediately after Bias's death, the speaker of the House of
Representatives, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr., from the Boston area
(where Bias had just signed with the Celtics), issued a demand to his
fellow Democrats for anti-drug legislation. Senior congressional
staffers began meeting regularly in the speaker's conference room as
practically every committee in the House wrote Len Bias-inspired
legislation attacking the drug problem. News conferences around the
Capitol featured members of Congress extolling their efforts to clamp
down on cocaine and crack.

One result was the innocuous-sounding Narcotics Penalties and
Enforcement Act, which became the first element of the enormous
Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, hurried to the floor a little over two
months after Bias's death. But the effect of the penalties and
enforcement legislation was to put back into federal law the kind of
clumsy mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses that had been
done away with 16 years before. And there they remain, 20 years and
several hundred thousand defendants later.

Congress wanted to send several messages by again enacting mandatory
minimums: to the Justice Department to be more focused on high-level
traffickers; to major traffickers that the new penalties would
destroy them; to the voters that members of Congress could fight
crime as vigorously as the police and prosecutors. But Congress
garbled the message. Instead of targeting large-scale traffickers, it
established low-level drug quantities to trigger lengthy mandatory
minimum prison terms: five grams (the weight of five packets of
artificial sweetener), 50 grams (the weight of a candy bar), 500
grams (the weight of two cups of sugar) or 5,000 grams (the weight of
a lunchbox of cocaine). Large-scale traffickers organize shipments of
drugs totaling tons -- many millions of grams -- filling
tractor-trailers, airplanes and fishing boats.

The Justice Department has compounded the problem by focusing on
countless low-level offenders. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reports
that only 15 percent of federal cocaine traffickers can be classified
as high-level. Seventy percent are low-level. One-third of all
federal cocaine cases involve an average of 52 grams, a candy
bar-sized quantity of cocaine, resulting in an average sentence of
almost nine years in prison without parole.

Not surprisingly, the federal prison population has exploded. From
1954 to 1976, it fluctuated between 20,000 and 24,000. By 1986 it had
grown to 36,000. Today it exceeds 190,000 prisoners, up 527 percent
in 20 years. More than half this population is made up of drug
offenders, most of whom are serving sentences created in the weeks
after Len Bias died.

Sadly, the nation's drug abuse situation is not much better after 20
years. Teenagers are using very dangerous drugs at twice the rate
they did in the 1980s. The price of cocaine is much lower and the
purity much higher, which tells us that the traffickers have become
more efficient.

There is a trickle of hope that mandatory sentences as a legacy of
Bias's death might come to an end. A handful of conservative members
of the House Judiciary Committee have begun to question the wisdom of
current mandatory minimum sentencing laws, and some vote against
them. The first round of mandatory minimums for drug offenses,
enacted in 1951, was repealed almost 20 years later, with bipartisan
support. Among those who backed repeal was George H.W. Bush, then a
congressman from Texas. With his son in the White House, this would
be a good time for history to repeat itself, and for this sad legacy
of Len Bias's death to finally end.