COMMON SENSE REPLACES HYSTERIA WITH HIGH COURT'S COCAINE RULINGS

Young black and Latino men imprisoned during our 20-year war on crack
cocaine see the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings allowing trial judges to
show more leniency in drug-related cases, plus changes in the federal
sentencing guidelines, as a holiday-timed offer of freedom.

Let others debate whether the court's 7-2 majorities in two cases --
including one involving a crack-cocaine-related sentence -- represent
a civil-rights triumph unseen since Brown v. Board of Education. To
really extend the historical imagery here, it is worth noting that
this week in 1865 the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing
slavery, went into effect.

Back to terra firma, where most of us reside. As a result of the U.S.
Sentencing Commission's retroactive amendments, several thousand
prisoners sentenced under the old guidelines may petition for early
release in March. Inmates won't suddenly flood from prison gates
swung open. Federal judges will decide cases individually. Dangerous
prisoners won't make the cut.

The ones likely to benefit are the street sellers, mostly African
Americans, who were dealt the heavy hand of the law while the dealers
who sold them the powder cocaine they used to make crack got a
less-punitive version of justice.

The uneven scales of justice used for crack and powder cocaine
convictions grew in an era of hysteria. I remember the mid-'80s when
the other Washington -- known as one of the most beautiful cities in
the world -- became the murder capital of the world.

A new drug called crack was responsible. Emaciated figures with dead
eyes and vacant lives were telltale signs that someone had crossed
over from human to crack addict. You didn't have to do crack to be
personally touched by it.

Family events were punctuated by an admonition to "hide your purse,
cousin So-and-So is on crack."

Strolling around D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood, I once came upon a
toddler in diapers near a woman lying in the yard. Dead or drugged
out, I never discovered. Family members came out and unkindly invited
me to move on. I had to work to shake the image of that child facing
a life's deck already stacked taller than he was.

As a novice reporter, one of my first big stories was a federal drug
trial that ended with a 20-something dealer sentenced to life in
prison, no parole. At least he wouldn't be lonely. His father was
already in prison. His mother, sisters and a cadre of friends and
relatives were on trial with him.

This was the milieu in which congressional lawmakers tripped over
themselves vying to be the toughest on crime. New federal guidelines
meted out harsh justice to deter the crack scourge. It was a
bipartisan, widely heralded event.

The law of unintended consequences took effect. The sentencing
guidelines were meant to provide a dose of toughness but also
uniformity in drug sentencing. Instead, it created two classes of
drug prisoners. The result today is that 85 percent of the 19,500
federal inmates incarcerated on crack-related charges are African Americans.

Crack is cocaine. The same drug, used in different ways by different
groups of people, has created a two-track system of justice. Justice
is supposed to be colorblind. It should also be immune to whether a
drug is snorted from a gilded mirror or cooked in an old, bent spoon.

The nightmarish scenario that fed the crack hysteria didn't come to
pass. But crack use continues to devastate lives and families. Crack
is a social ill on par with its predecessor, heroin, and its rural
contemporary, methamphetamine.

It warrants attention but not "special treatment." Justice's uneven
scales emptied communities of so many. My cynical mind says some of
them were headed to prison anyway, and good riddance. But others were
like Kemba Smith, a sweet-faced, middle-class college student from
Virginia given a 24-year mandatory sentence for carrying drugs for
her boyfriend.

Public outrage and media attention led former President Bill Clinton
to commute Smith's sentence, but not before she did eight years hard time.

Others who got caught up in the war on drugs didn't make as
compelling a media figure as Smith. For them, the Supreme Court's
influential voice, coupled with judges empowered to use their own
discretion, offers a glimmer of hope.