METH VS. CRACK: DIFFERENT LEGISLATIVE APPROACHES

When Rep. Elijah E. Cummings visits rural communities in the Midwest
that have been ravaged by methamphetamine use, he hears stories of
despair and damage not unlike those he heard during the crack
epidemic of the 1980s. His hometown of Baltimore includes some of the
neighborhoods that were devastated the worst by crack, the last drug
epidemic to draw an intense response from the federal government and
local law enforcement.

The similarities exist despite fundamental differences between the
populations affected by the two drugs. Meth is used mostly by white
people in rural areas, while the epicenters of the crack epidemic
were the African-American communities of the inner cities.

"If you were to close your eyes and listen to how they talk about the
effect on communities, how it breaks up families and drives down
property values, you would swear they were in any urban community"
during crack's heyday, Cummings says.

What's different this time are the solutions that his congressional
colleagues are promoting. The first comprehensive federal anti-meth
law, enacted this year, focuses on cutting off the supply of the
chemical ingredients used to make the drug -- not on toughening
punishments for dealers or users.

"There seems to be more of an emphasis on shutting down these meth
labs and trying to figure out ways to treat these addicts and then
get them back into flow of society," says Cummings, a Maryland
Democrat. "We don't get for crack or heroin that kind of support for
prevention, treatment and rehabilitation."

Cummings is not alone in pointing out the apparent double standard,
in both policy and rhetoric, that Congress is applying to the growing
scourge of methamphetamine abuse. Lawmakers in both parties
consistently characterize meth addicts in more sympathetic terms than
they describe crack addicts, and they are showing far less enthusiasm
for imprisoning users than at the height of the crack problem two decades ago.

It's not that meth is generating any less concern in affected areas
today than crack did two decades ago. In both instances, members of
Congress warned loudly that police in their communities were
overwhelmed by a cheap, easy to obtain, highly addictive and almost
untreatable menace.

Although lawmakers almost always rebut the notion, their own rhetoric
suggests that race is an essential -- albeit, perhaps subconscious --
reason they are treating the two drug epidemics differently. Some
sociologists and criminologists say the racial component is obvious.

"The difference is, meth is a white drug," says Daniel F. Wilhelm of
the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization that
seeks to reduce racially disparate prosecutions.

"You don't see any pictures of young black men and women described as
the face of meth," said Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, which
advocates for overhauling sentencing law -- a reference to the
before-and-after mug shots that sheriffs' offices and lawmakers often
display to highlight the physical toll of meth addiction.

Sixty percent of people sent to federal prison for meth crimes were
white and just 2 percent were black in fiscal 2004, the last year
with complete statistics reported by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
By contrast, 10 percent of the people convicted of crack crimes that
year were white and 80 percent were black. (In both cases, Hispanics
represent the bulk of the difference.)

Leaders in setting drug policy on Capitol Hill have three principal
explanations for why Washington is approaching the meth problem
differently from the crack problem. First, manufacturers of
methamphetamines -- also known as crank or speed -- are uniquely
dependent on a few commercially available chemical ingredients, so
targeting them instead of the people involved is the more efficient
way to limit the drug. Second, congressional enthusiasm for tough
mandatory minimum prison sentences has waned recently among
Republicans and Democrats alike. And, finally, the political benefits
of waging a war on drugs has declined in recent years, especially as
the nation's voters' attention has been shifted more to the war on
terrorism since Sept. 11.

Still, listening to the way members of Congress talk about meth users
and the images they invoke to portray the problem leaves observers
such as Craig Reinarman, a sociology professor at the University of
California Santa Cruz convinced that many lawmakers at least talk
about drug users differently when they're "drawn from the good old
boy segment of our society, the us rather than the them."

The 'Most Virulent' Drug

What hasn't changed is the level of alarm that members of Congress
from both parties profess when they decide there's a drug crisis.

Who Gets Convicted

In 1986, they expressed anxiety over the emergence of crack, a cheap
cocaine derivative that delivers a quick, powerful but relatively
short-lived high when smoked. Then, too, there was a racial subtext
to the rhetoric -- particularly after the death of Len Bias, who had
been picked first by the Boston Celtics in that year's NBA draft.

His high-profile death on the suburban University of Maryland campus
exactly 20 years ago this month was initially attributed to an
overdose of crack. Though an autopsy later showed cocaine rather than
crack caused Bias' death, it nonetheless helped fuel a hysteria that
summer about the drug, driven in part by fears that crack would jump
"into the suburbs on both coasts," as a Newsweek cover story warned
at the time.

In the succeeding months, lawmakers competed to describe crack in
dire terms. Peter W. Rodino Jr., the New Jersey Democrat who then
chaired the House Judiciary Committee, called it a "plague on our
nation." Republican Sen. Paula Hawkins of Florida, warned that it
turned people "into walking crime machines." That state's other
senator at the time, Democrat Lawton Chiles, said it can "make people
into slaves."

Twenty years later, there is a new and bipartisan push to describe
meth as an even worse drug plague. While it has been available much
longer than crack, its use has grown -- and spread geographically --
much slower. Motorcycle gangs sold meth along the Pacific coast in
the 1960s, but only in the last decade has its use spread widely
throughout the West and into the Midwest. The drug's popularity has
been principally in rural communities, which lack police forces and
treatment centers to fight it.

The number of meth addicts more than doubled between 2002 and 2004,
the year when the number of people who said they'd used meth in the
previous year (1.4 million) for the first time exceeded the number
who said they'd used crack (1.3 million), according to the Department
of Health and Human Services. By 2005, a National Association of
Counties survey of mostly rural and suburban jurisdictions found meth
as the biggest drug problem for local law enforcement agencies.

Where The Labs Are

Lawmakers argue that meth -- which can be smoked, snorted, orally
ingested or injected -- is even cheaper to purchase, easier to find,
more addictive and more harmful to the body than crack. Orrin G.
Hatch, the No. 2 Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, calls
it "the most virulent drug there is." Another Utah Republican, Rep.
Chris Cannon, says that while "crack is associated with fast living,"
meth "is like crashing into a wall."

Rural and suburban lawmakers from the West and Midwest profess shock
at the level of addiction that has reached into their parts of the
country, which have never before been associated with widespread drug abuse.

Meth "is disturbing the quiet peaceful feelings in rural parts of the
country," laments Republican Rep. Mark Kennedy of Minnesota, who
represents suburbs north and east of the Twin Cities. "Its use is now
also transcending social classes and gender," says Rep. Ra??l M.
Grijalva, a Democrat whose Hispanic-majority district includes most
of Arizona's border with Mexico. "There is no common denominator in
categorizing a meth user. It could be your neighbor, a family member,
a teenager, a mom."

Users As Victims

The lawmakers most vocally concerned about meth reject the notion
that they're sympathetic to meth users because they tend to come from
a higher-income, less urban and more white demographic than users of
other narcotics.

In fact, Republican Mark Souder, who sponsored the House version of
the anti-meth legislation enacted this year, says he and his
northeastern Indiana constituents have less compassion for meth users
than for other addicts. "When you come from areas where you see
opportunities exist and you get whacked out on drugs, the sympathy is
less than for in urban areas where they have no jobs or may not have
fathers," he says.

But when many members talk about meth users, their sympathy often
shines through.

"I view many of them as victims," says GOP Rep. Ken Calvert of
Southern California.

Kennedy invoked "the tragic story of a young girl named Megan from a
beautiful town" in his state when he appeared before a House
Judiciary panel last fall to promote his own meth-fighting
legislation. She got hooked on meth in seventh grade and turned to
prostitution to pay for her habit, he said, and "In the face of so
much suffering, we have an obligation to act."

Democrat Rick Larsen, who represents suburban territory north of
Seattle, volunteers that he has no particular sympathy for meth
users. But when talking about them, the constituent he first invokes
by name is Ashley Kerwin, who became addicted at age 15 even though
she is from "a good family, solid family" with a father who is "a
successful commercial realtor."

And, at a Senate Finance Committee hearing in April on meth's effects
on the welfare system, Republican Chairman Charles E. Grassley of
Iowa and ranking Democrat Max Baucus of Montana clapped after a pair
of recovering meth addicts from suburban St. Louis, Aaronette and
Darren Noble, described their recovery. They applauded even though
Darren, 34, had described how he served 46 months in prison for
manufacturing meth. (Baucus also cooed over the "big blue eyes" of
the couple's 15-month-old daughter, Summer, who sat on her mother's
lap. The Nobles had only recently regained custody because she was
born with meth in her system.)

In an interview later, Baucus said he was "quite certain" he would
have reacted the same way to similar testimony by crack addicts. But,
minutes later, he conceded that he feels more sympathy for meth users
because "there are more kids involved, it's harder to solve,
addictiveness is higher than crack or heroin."

The greater sympathy expressed by members of Congress, such as
Baucus, is not much different than how African-American members
responded to crack: Lawmakers are most concerned with problems that
affect their constituents most directly. The problem is how little
overlap there is between those two groups of lawmakers. Of the 138
members of the Congressional Meth Caucus, 127 are white.

Law enforcement officers on the front lines view the issue quite
differently. Jim Tilley, who runs the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) field office in Baucus' home state and worked as an agent in
New York City during the peak of the crack epidemic, rejects the idea
that meth users are "just our neighbors or just people with some problems."

"The same people who use meth also sell meth, or cook it and sell it,
and it ends up in our schools, your neighborhood," Tilley said. "Most
people realize that, whether it's meth or crack, people have
problems, but it doesn't get into our schools by itself."

Mark A.R. Kleiman, a UCLA public policy professor who studies drug
addiction, says such lack of sympathy among law enforcement is
typical: "If you talk to rural deputy sheriffs about meth users and
urban cops about crackheads, you're going to hear exactly the same
thing: These are bad scary people."

Tough on Crack

Concern about crack infused the writing of the anti-drug statutes of
both 1986 and 1988 -- the statutes that continue to dominate the way
federal lawbooks address narcotics, and the baseline from which
Congress starts in reshaping drug laws.

The 1980s laws did everything from mandating drug testing to funding
domestic drug treatment and education and international interdiction.
And buried in each were provisions subjecting people connected with
crack to more stringent punishments than those connected to any other drug.

Without any legislative hearing and little controversy at the time,
Congress in the 1986 law created the first mandatory minimum prison
sentences for traffickers in different types of narcotics. For every
drug except crack, the amount required to subject a person to the
mandatory minimum appeared to approximate the quantity that a
mid-level dealer might have in his possession for resale and was far
above the amount someone would normally obtain for personal use.

For crack, however, the trigger was set much lower. And so there is a
100-to-1 differential between what subjects a powder cocaine dealer
versus a crack cocaine dealer to a mandatory minimum stay in federal
prison. Trafficking in 500 grams of powder -- which can yield 10,000
or more "lines," or doses -- draws the same five-year sentence as
trafficking in five grams of crack, which yields no more than 50
"hits" off a pipe. Trafficking in 5,000 grams (or 11 pounds) of
powder or 50 grams of crack triggers yields an identical a 10-year
mandatory minimum.

The disparity was motivated partly by crack's perceived role at the
time in spawning particularly violent crime and partly by the nature
of the drug's distribution: Generally street dealers, not wholesaler
"kingpins," put cocaine, baking powder and water in a microwave oven
to create crack rocks for retail sale.

The 100-to-1 differential has contributed to the incarceration of
huge numbers of African-Americans, who commit more than 80 percent of
crack crimes. The average sentence for someone convicted of a crack
crime in fiscal 2004 was 118 months, 38 months longer than for a
cocaine crime and 26 months longer than for a meth crime.

The differential was determined not by any objective determinations
of crack's more serious impact on society, said law professor David
Alan Sklansky of the University of California at Berkeley, but
instead was the result of a drive among lawmakers to come up with the
toughest possible response. The differential "was driven by this
hysteria about crack cocaine and by a lack of concern about who would
be receiving these sentences," Sklansky said. "That lack of concern
was related to the fact that everybody understood that crack dealers
were black men."

That view is echoed by Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington's non-voting
Democratic delegate in the House: "Nobody in the African- American
community will think it's not racially connected," she says of the
differential. "It has to do with being unsympathetic towards drug
dealers in the ghetto."

Those sentiments hardly surfaced in the congressional debate. In
fact, such influential black lawmakers as Democrat Charles B. Rangel
of New York, who at the time chaired a House Select Committee on
Narcotics Abuse, initially supported the differential as a way to
curb what that they viewed as a dangerous and potent drug devastating
their constituents.

In 1988, Congress went on to create the first -- and still only --
mandatory minimum federal sentence for simple possession of a drug:
Conviction for holding five grams of crack (three grams, if it's a
second offense) draws a required five-year term. Simple possession of
any amount of cocaine, by contrast, is a misdemeanor punishable by a
year in jail.

Crack possession is rarely prosecuted on its own and accounts for
less than 1 percent of crack offenders sentenced in federal court.
But former federal prosecutors say that having the option to
prosecute such an offense can provide them leverage in obtaining plea
agreements.

Targeting the Labs

While lawmakers of today describe meth as a scourge as severe as
crack, if not worse, there has been no concerted legislative effort
to create a mandatory minimum sentence for its possession. And this
winter, congressional negotiators rejected an effort to make the
mandatory minimum sentence for meth traffickers even stiffer than for
crack traffickers -- at least five years for peddling as few as three
grams, and 10 years for selling as few as 30 grams.

Who Takes Speed

With almost no notice, Congress, in the omnibus appropriations
package of 1998, lowered the drug volume thresholds for applying the
mandatory minimums to meth dealers to be the same as those for crack
dealers. But the law continues to treat the two drugs unequally in
this sense: Measure for measure, speed provides at least three times
- -- and perhaps 10 times as many "hits" as crack.

While the negotiators rebuffed proposals to make the sentences for
meth traffickers the stiffest in the federal system, they did include
some anti-meth measures in the extension of the 2001 law known as the
Patriot Act that provides law enforcement with particularly broad
powers to combat terrorism. Principally, the language focused on
limiting backyard "mom and pop" meth production.

The DEA estimates the operators of such small-time meth labs produce
about one-fifth of the drug distributed in the United States. But
they are a disproportionately large concern to rural law enforcement
agents because the highly flammable toxic stews used to make the drug
can injure innocent bystanders and put police and firefighters at
severe health risk.

Recipes for meth are readily available on the Internet, and the
required equipment -- coffee filters, a pressure cooker and gas cans
- -- can be purchased at the hardware store for about $50. The key
ingredient is pseudoephedrine, which is a principal ingredient of
many cough and allergy medicines, such as Sudafed, on the shelves of
pharmacies and convenience stores. The new law seeks to limit the
supply of pseudoephedrine available to meth makers by limiting
consumer purchases of medicines containing that chemical and
requiring sales of those medicines from behind the counter as a means
of curbing theft.

To address international production, the law authorizes funds to halt
speed production in Mexico and requires major exporters and importers
of drugs containing pseudoephedrine report their transactions. The
rationale for focusing the campaign against meth on its ingredients
is simple: It's much easier to enlist the corporate manufacturers and
retailers of its precursor chemicals than to shut down the thousands
of heroin poppy and coca fields spread all over the world.

Beyond Mandatory Minimums

In the two decades since the crack epidemic peaked, much has changed
in Congress' view of how best to fight drugs and punish those at the
bottom of the supply chain.

In 1986, mandatory minimums and the entire federal sentencing
guideline system were new innovations. "It was still a moment in time
that sentences were still relatively low and there was a na??ve
belief that severe sentences could be the solution to this problem,"
said Douglas Berman, a criminal law professor at Ohio State
University. "It's a radically different historical moment. We're at a
time that we've got a greater realization that severe sentences
cannot alone be the answer."

Souder says this year's anti-meth law reflects that lesson. "We're
not abandoning possession, but we're being more sophisticated about
the networks," he said. "Ultimately, we understand if we're going to
beat meth, it's going to be international, it's got to be along the
borders, it's got to be at the distribution systems. As long as
they're there, you will have possession."

With the exception of child sex crimes, there is little enthusiasm in
Congress for writing new mandatory minimum sentences. This winter,
for example, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee,
Republican F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, stripped a
collection of proposed mandatory minimum sentences from legislation
aimed at curbing both street gangs and violence against judges. He
did so, he said, to ease the bill's passage.

Rather than toughening punishment, Baucus says, "people are more
concerned about prevention and rehabilitation and getting the bad
actors." And such a sentiment comes not only from Democrats. "My
focus has not been on punishing users," says Kennedy, who is the GOP
candidate for the Senate in Minnesota this year. "I'm focused on
those who are preying on those who may ultimately become meth users."

Souder, too, concluded that securing the new restrictions on
pseudoephedrine was more important in the fight against meth than
toughening the sentencing of the dealers -- especially given the
resistance from pharmaceutical companies and retailers to the notion
of restricting access to cough syrup. In the end, Souder urged
Sensenbrenner to drop the mandatory minimums in a bid to boost
support for the restrictions on the medicines. "We decided moving
ahead in a bipartisan way was more important than arguing over the
minimums," he said. "For some Democrats, it was a non-starter. It was
simply not the most important thing we wanted to do."

The broader political context of the fight against crime has also
changed significantly in the last two decades. Polling during the
1986 and 1988 campaigns found that combating drugs was the nation's
top priority. President Ronald Reagan and Democrats in Congress
competed to come up with the most aggressive solutions.

"The Democrats were finally figuring out they couldn't afford to be
portrayed as soft on crime, and Republicans figured out running on
crime and justice issues served their interests very well," Berman said.

Now, crime and drugs have clearly become second-tier issues; in their
nationwide polls during the past six weeks that sought to gauge which
issues will matter the most to voters this fall, neither CNN, CBS,
Harris, Fox or NBC even suggested those issues as an option. Instead,
they have been supplanted as the principal political litmus test for
judging lawmakers' toughness. "Terrorism has sort of superseded it,"
Hatch said. "People are more concerned about terrorism now."

Ships in the Night

Another reason for the emerging double standard is that few lawmakers
notice it. Those in Congress most engaged in the fight against meth
are almost completely different from the set of lawmakers most
concerned about crack. In general, members of each group focus on a
drug problem that affects their own constituents and ignore the one
that doesn't.

Only five of the 44 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which
has taken the unofficial lead at the Capitol on the crack issue, also
belong to the Meth Caucus. Several members of the Black Caucus
describe themselves as not paying any attention to the meth issue.

Cummings stands out as an exception. But his interest has little to
do with parochial concerns. Instead, it has grown from his assignment
as the top Democrat on a House Government Reform subcommittee
assigned to oversee federal criminal justice and drug policy.
Cummings has accompanied Souder, the panel's chairman, to field
hearings on meth in rural Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.

With the area of intersection so small, few lawmakers are working to
make federal policy treat crimes connected to the two drugs more
consistently. That could most readily be accomplished by eliminating
the unique mandatory minimum for crack possession and by increasing
the quantity of crack required to draw a mandatory minimum for
trafficking, as the U.S. Sentencing Commission recommended four years ago.

A bill by Roscoe G. Bartlett, a Maryland Republican, to narrow the
sentencing differential has drawn just three cosponsors. There is no
companion bill in the Senate, where Hatch last proposed similar
legislation in 2001. Making punishments for crack crimes closer to
that of other drug crimes is a matter of "decency and fairness,"
Hatch says, but there is minimal interest in the idea among his colleagues.

"Political realities make it too dangerous," Berman said, because
advocates of lessening the crack penalties would inevitably be
portrayed by their opponents as soft on crime. "Nobody sees the
political benefits of this. It's very hard for anyone to see the
political pros of this and extraordinarily easy to see the cons."

With the law to limit access to meth ingredients on the books,
members of the House Meth Caucus and the Senate's leading voices
against the drug, Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California and
Republican Jim Talent of Missouri, say their top priority is
providing more money for treatment.

Law-and-order Republicans' experience with meth may lead them to
rethink harsh prison sentences for drug crimes across the board. Or
they could buttress their contention that race plays no role in their
policy making by instituting mandatory minimums that sweep in as many
users and low-level dealers of meth as of crack.

Even supporters of this year's law acknowledge that, while putting
cold medicines behind the counter may help curb local meth labs, it's
unlikely to significantly reduce meth use.

If the focus on interdiction and treatment fails, Congress could turn
to tougher criminal sentences as a way to show their constituents
they are doing something about the problem. Or it might focus its ire
on Mexico, the main location of the "super labs" that will supply
almost all meth to the United States even if the mom and pop labs shut down.

In the coming years, said Daniel Richman, a Fordham University law
professor and former federal prosecutor, "I could imagine a
legislative response to meth that wouldn't look much different than
the legislative response to crack."