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Barry, the black nationalist who led Washington, D.C., into fiscal
chaos, hit bottom twelve years ago this week, when FBI agents burst
into a room at the Vista International Hotel and arrested the high-living
mayor for smoking crack cocaine. Amid the record crime rates of
the mid 1980s and early 1990s, crack — a cheap form of cocaine
that produces brief, intense highs — attracted widespread media
attention as the new urban plague. Barry eventually got out of jail
and won reelection as mayor, but many of the drug's users and small-time
dealers continue to pass their days in federal prison.
In response
to crack, the mid-1980s saw Congress enact a series of laws which
made crack possession one of the most serious federal crimes: Having
even five grams of crack incurs the same penalties as having 500
grams of powder cocaine, or similarly massive quantities of any
other drug. Stiff sentences like these constitute exhibit A in the
far Left's efforts to prove that America is racist. Some evidence,
indeed, appears to support this contention: The National Institute
on Drug Abuse estimates that America has about 700,000 crack users
and that about 60 percent of them are black. Because inner-city-street
drug markets are a far easier place to make arrests than are the
nightclubs and private homes where most whites buy drugs, however,
African Americans account for about 90 percent of crack arrests.
Now, all this may change. DEA head Asa Hutchinson has said that
he supports narrowing the gap between crack and powder cocaine sentences
under federal law; and a Republican-sponsored drug-law reform bill,
introduced at the very end of last year, has a decent chance of
landing on the president's desk.
Crack-sentence
reform is a good idea, though not for the reasons the Left cites.
Indeed, racism has never had anything to do with federal crack laws.
As Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy notes in his 1997 book,
Race,
Crime, and the Law, the statutes that increased crack penalties
passed with the enthusiastic support of the Congressional Black
Caucus. Crack had devastated black communities in particular, and
elected officials were understandably desperate to punish the thugs
who pushed the stuff. As long as crack-related crime continued to
spin out of control, nobody objected to the tough punishments: Not
a single big-name black activist or major newspaper made a peep
about the law's racially disparate effects until crime started heading
down in 1992.
Indeed, stiffer
penalties have worked. Since the early 1980s, overall cocaine use
has fallen 75 percent. Since the crack epidemic began waning in
black neighborhoods during the early 1990s — around the time
longer sentences, passed five years earlier, began to make a difference
— African-Americans' victimization rates have been cut in half.
Crack laws, indeed, provide a disproportionate federal benefit
to black communities. A local police department that wants to take
out a crack-dealing gang on some street corners around a mostly
black housing project has a good chance of getting some federal
help if they ask.
And that's
just the problem. Because the quantities needed to trigger federal
charges remain so small, a crack "conspiracy" worthy of
federal scrutiny can consist of two bored, thuggish homeboys with
a hot plate. A street-corner drug tout can find himself doing hard
time in the federal pen for having a pocketful of rocks. And local
police departments get used to calling in the feds — even when
dealing with purely local thugs.
While the federal
government should get out of the business of busting small-time
drug runners, even the most ardent advocates of legalization may
want to pause when it comes to crack. While people like journalist
Ann Marlowe have managed to maintain stable working lives while
using heroin every day, crack almost always makes its users violent.
One could spend years living beside a heroin addict or big-time
pothead and notice little besides an emaciated appearance or fondness
for the Grateful Dead. In the case of crack, however, even "peaceful"
addicts are likely to break windows and shoot dogs. When local police
departments ignored crack in the early 1980s, violence spun out
of control around the country. Even if powder cocaine were to be
legalized, it would still make sense to ban crack just as we currently
outlaw absinthe, moonshine, and a few other particularly potent
spirits. But that doesn't mean every street-corner crack pusher
needs to do federal time.
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