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Five Myths About Crack
By Craig Reinarman
The Washington Post
Before they decide a crack-related case on sentencing guidelines, the Justices should get their crack facts straight.
Should judges have the discretion to depart from sentencing guidelines if they lead to unjust results? The Supreme Court wrestled with this question last week during oral arguments in Kimbrough v. U.S., a crack-related case.
At the peak of the panic over crack cocaine in the mid-1980s, Congress passed a rash of laws requiring longer prison sentences. One such law created a 100-to-1 disparity between crack and cocaine offenses; you'd have to get caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine -- but only 5 grams of crack cocaine -- to get a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.
Crack is often used in impoverished inner cities, and police focus surveillance there. The result has been racially discriminatory sentencing that has packed prisons with African-Americans. Many state and district court judges agree that the disparity is unfair, and only 13 of the 50 states still make a legal distinction between crack and cocaine.
It will take acrobatic feats of legal reasoning for the Supreme Court to reconcile the clashing principles in this case: Respect for congressional intent (harsh sentences); upholding uniformity of justice (similar punishments for similar crimes); and affording judges the discretion they need to perform their constitutional role (make the punishment fit the crime).
The high court's task would be easier if it recognized that the 20-year-old crack laws are based on at least five myths.
1. Crack is different than cocaine.
When the crack scare began in the mid-1980s, politicians and the media outdid each other with horror stories about this new chemical bogeyman. They spoke as if crack were a completely different drug than cocaine. That is a pharmacological fallacy.
Crack is simply the base form of cocaine hydrochloride powder, which is heated into a solid rock and smoked. Cocaine is crack that is snorted in powder form. The only difference is that smoking delivers more cocaine to the brain faster -- just as vodka will get you drunk faster than wine. Smoking crack is merely a more intense way to ingest the drug. Even the director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse testified in 2006 that the "pharmacological effects of cocaine are the same, regardless of whether it is in the form of cocaine hydrochloride [powder] or crack cocaine the base."
2. Crack is instantly and inevitably addicting.
Officials justified the new laws by claiming that crack was "the most addictive substance ever known." Experts and ex-addicts agree that crack cocaine produces a powerful rush and is easy to abuse. Many users have binged on it compulsively and done themselves serious harm.
Yet the great majority of people who try crack do not continue to use it. For 20 years, the government's National Survey on Drug Use and Health has found that about 80 percent of those who have ever tried crack had not used it in the past year. And a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that crack cocaine is not significantly more addictive than powder cocaine.
3. The "plague" of crack use spread quickly into all sectors of society.
This never happened. Whatever its allure, crack use never spread very far into suburban high schools, college campuses or the working and middle classes. Crack use remains concentrated among a small slice of the most vulnerable part of the population: marginalized poor people.
When this mode of ingesting cocaine first appeared among wealthy Wall Streeters, professional athletes, rock stars and Hollywood types, it was called "freebasing." When some of them got into trouble doing it, treatment programs were expanded. But when people in ghettos and barrios did the same thing, it led to calls for harsher prison sentences.
4. Crack is the direct cause of violent crime.
Politicians repeatedly cited the association between crack and crime to justify Draconian new laws. It is true that many crack abusers have committed crimes. At first, everyone assumed that this crack-crime connection stemmed from the addict's craving for crack's potent high. But it turns out that the link is more complex. Studies of New York City police records funded by the Department of Justice showed that factors such as unemployment, poverty, hugely profitable illicit drug markets and the easy availability of firearms contributed to most "crack-related homicides." What's more, crack use has persisted at nearly the prevalence of 20 years ago, but violent crime has declined dramatically for a decade.
5. Harsh sentences for crack are necessary to deter "serious" and "major traffickers."
This was what Congress claimed when it passed the laws, but it defined "serious" trafficking as 5 grams -- less than one-sixth of an ounce. U.S. Sentencing Commission figures have long shown that more than three-fourths of those snagged are merely users and low-level sellers caught with tiny amounts. And they are overwhelmingly African-Americans. Perversely, small-time sellers serve prison sentences up to five times longer than the cocaine powder dealers caught with the same weight -- and who may well have supplied them.
These laws have helped increase the number of drug offenders in U.S. prisons ninefold, from about 50,000 when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 to more than 450,000 today. They have helped give the U.S. the highest rate of incarceration in the world. This costs American taxpayers billions each year -- but it has never made much of a dent in our most serious drug problems. We cannot incarcerate our way to a "drug-free society."
Craig Reinarman, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, is co-author of "Crack In America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice.
Link!
By Craig Reinarman
The Washington Post
Before they decide a crack-related case on sentencing guidelines, the Justices should get their crack facts straight.
Should judges have the discretion to depart from sentencing guidelines if they lead to unjust results? The Supreme Court wrestled with this question last week during oral arguments in Kimbrough v. U.S., a crack-related case.
At the peak of the panic over crack cocaine in the mid-1980s, Congress passed a rash of laws requiring longer prison sentences. One such law created a 100-to-1 disparity between crack and cocaine offenses; you'd have to get caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine -- but only 5 grams of crack cocaine -- to get a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.
Crack is often used in impoverished inner cities, and police focus surveillance there. The result has been racially discriminatory sentencing that has packed prisons with African-Americans. Many state and district court judges agree that the disparity is unfair, and only 13 of the 50 states still make a legal distinction between crack and cocaine.
It will take acrobatic feats of legal reasoning for the Supreme Court to reconcile the clashing principles in this case: Respect for congressional intent (harsh sentences); upholding uniformity of justice (similar punishments for similar crimes); and affording judges the discretion they need to perform their constitutional role (make the punishment fit the crime).
The high court's task would be easier if it recognized that the 20-year-old crack laws are based on at least five myths.
1. Crack is different than cocaine.
When the crack scare began in the mid-1980s, politicians and the media outdid each other with horror stories about this new chemical bogeyman. They spoke as if crack were a completely different drug than cocaine. That is a pharmacological fallacy.
Crack is simply the base form of cocaine hydrochloride powder, which is heated into a solid rock and smoked. Cocaine is crack that is snorted in powder form. The only difference is that smoking delivers more cocaine to the brain faster -- just as vodka will get you drunk faster than wine. Smoking crack is merely a more intense way to ingest the drug. Even the director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse testified in 2006 that the "pharmacological effects of cocaine are the same, regardless of whether it is in the form of cocaine hydrochloride [powder] or crack cocaine the base."
2. Crack is instantly and inevitably addicting.
Officials justified the new laws by claiming that crack was "the most addictive substance ever known." Experts and ex-addicts agree that crack cocaine produces a powerful rush and is easy to abuse. Many users have binged on it compulsively and done themselves serious harm.
Yet the great majority of people who try crack do not continue to use it. For 20 years, the government's National Survey on Drug Use and Health has found that about 80 percent of those who have ever tried crack had not used it in the past year. And a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that crack cocaine is not significantly more addictive than powder cocaine.
3. The "plague" of crack use spread quickly into all sectors of society.
This never happened. Whatever its allure, crack use never spread very far into suburban high schools, college campuses or the working and middle classes. Crack use remains concentrated among a small slice of the most vulnerable part of the population: marginalized poor people.
When this mode of ingesting cocaine first appeared among wealthy Wall Streeters, professional athletes, rock stars and Hollywood types, it was called "freebasing." When some of them got into trouble doing it, treatment programs were expanded. But when people in ghettos and barrios did the same thing, it led to calls for harsher prison sentences.
4. Crack is the direct cause of violent crime.
Politicians repeatedly cited the association between crack and crime to justify Draconian new laws. It is true that many crack abusers have committed crimes. At first, everyone assumed that this crack-crime connection stemmed from the addict's craving for crack's potent high. But it turns out that the link is more complex. Studies of New York City police records funded by the Department of Justice showed that factors such as unemployment, poverty, hugely profitable illicit drug markets and the easy availability of firearms contributed to most "crack-related homicides." What's more, crack use has persisted at nearly the prevalence of 20 years ago, but violent crime has declined dramatically for a decade.
5. Harsh sentences for crack are necessary to deter "serious" and "major traffickers."
This was what Congress claimed when it passed the laws, but it defined "serious" trafficking as 5 grams -- less than one-sixth of an ounce. U.S. Sentencing Commission figures have long shown that more than three-fourths of those snagged are merely users and low-level sellers caught with tiny amounts. And they are overwhelmingly African-Americans. Perversely, small-time sellers serve prison sentences up to five times longer than the cocaine powder dealers caught with the same weight -- and who may well have supplied them.
These laws have helped increase the number of drug offenders in U.S. prisons ninefold, from about 50,000 when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 to more than 450,000 today. They have helped give the U.S. the highest rate of incarceration in the world. This costs American taxpayers billions each year -- but it has never made much of a dent in our most serious drug problems. We cannot incarcerate our way to a "drug-free society."
Craig Reinarman, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, is co-author of "Crack In America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice.
Link!
(DMT)
