Crack in the system

A rare sighting of bipartisanship

It’s hard to blame, really, the politicians in the 1980s who were scared silly of this new thing called “crack cocaine.” After all, their constituents were scared silly. And demanded action. This drug was taking over their streets, their neighborhoods, their schools. People demanded action. Politicians went to work rewriting the laws.

Attention was paid. And if we may go into the passive voice one more time, mistakes were made.

Asa Hutchinson isn’t new to this battle, or this subject. He has been in law enforcement a long time, including as a prosecutor and even more recently spent as a chief executive of a state. He’s been talking about the disparity between powder cocaine and crack cocaine sentencing laws for decades now. And perhaps, just perhaps, there’s enough bipartisanship still around in Washington, D.C., to eliminate the disparity altogether.

Way back in 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which targeted the drug kingpins of crack cocaine. Unfortunately, laws don’t always hit their targets. In a story for this paper last week, Frank Lockwood notes that under the 1986 law, “a first-time offender convicted of possessing 5 grams of crack cocaine would be treated the same way as a first-time offender possessing 500 grams of powder cocaine.” Which seemed, at the time, copacetic.

But drugpolicy.org says there “are no pharmacological differences between powder cocaine and crack cocaine.” WebMD.com says, “You may wonder how these drugs differ and if one is more dangerous to use than the other. In short, the answer is no.” The Oxford Treatment Center says the two substances are almost chemically identical.

There are those who’d point out that crack is more concentrated, thus the “high” can be more intense. (The Oxford Treatment Center says crack users “may be more likely to binge.”) There are differences in the way the drug gets into the body. Some treatment doctors say that smoking crack puts the drug into the system faster, and the addiction is “reinforced,” as they say.

But the main difference is in criminal sentencing. And therein lies a big problem for this country.

Adecade ago, the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the disparity between powder and crack cocaine sentencing. But didn’t eliminate it. The 2010 bill had overwhelming support. Now the Congress is considering going further and not just reducing but eliminating disparities in prison sentences.

As most Americans know by now, the sentencing laws for cocaine offenses in this country put many more Black Americans behind bars for longer periods of time.

Thus the lack of fairness and trust in the system. A point being made by members of both major political parties in the United States.

Gov. Hutchinson, a Republican in good standing, spoke before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee this week, urging the Congress to go the extra step to eliminate sentencing imbalances. The Arkansas governor, who happens to be a former head of the federal DEA, told lawmakers the double standard disproportionately affects people of color.

“The sentencing disparity is unfair,” Gov. Hutchinson said. “Just as importantly, it is perceived as unfair and undermines confidence in our criminal justice system.”

Aha. No matter what most folks might have thought about crack cocaine in the 1980s, Asa Hutchinson is focusing the problem for 2021.

He continued: “All those in law enforcement understand how critical a sense of fairness is to achieve cooperation, respect, and to reinforce the rule of law.”

When the War on Drugs first started, conservative politicians, voters and even editorialists thought throwing the book at crack cocaine users and street dealers really would clean up the streets.

Instead, it put a disproportionate number of Black Americans in prison, while others charged with powder cocaine offenses walked much earlier. Asa Hutchinson’s point — that this undermines the perception of fairness in the system — is valid. And as long as it is, a part of our country’s population will consider themselves unfair targets. And trust in the system, so damaged in this past year of our discontent, will be slow to rebuild.

This is not to say that the War on Drugs is over and lost. Or that We the People should stop fighting it, as has been suggested by various commentators. Drugs — powder, pills, liquid, otherwise — are still tearing apart families and communities. Neither the majority of Democrats nor Republicans is quite Libertarian enough to follow that path. Over a cliff.

Making prison sentences fair doesn’t mean making prison sentences disappear.

But this effort, this bipartisan effort, to make the law more fair should count as one more step this country took in 2021 to repair the cracks between us all.