Crack vs. heroin: 2 races, 2 results
System unevenly sought punishment for blacks, treatment for whites
Dannis Billups’ addiction nightmare began with an actual nightmare when he was about 4 years old. His daddy sat him on his knee and gave him a half can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer to soothe him.
In the 1980s, he joined the “family trade,” peddling crack cocaine on the streets of Newark, New Jersey.
Within a few years, he became his best customer. His life became a never-ending ride on the criminal justice carousel: arrests, jail, probation and then back in the system for another spin, some two dozen times.
“They would never offer you treatment,” said Billups, now 53. “They would just lock you away and forget about you.”
A generation after crack hit Newark, in the idyllic Jersey Shore suburb of Manasquan, a white hometown foot
ball hero named Richie Lapinski took a seat on the same merry-go-round. Like Billups, Lapinski developed a substance abuse problem, although his drugs of choice were prescription pills and heroin, the growing menace of whites.
But where Billups was punished with jail and probation, Lapinski’s addiction treatment was paid for by taxpayers. He landed in Drug Court – not the true lockem’-up criminal court Billups faced – where Lapinski’s record could be wiped clean. He was granted a new life outside of the system, if he kept his end of the bargain and stayed clean.
Different times. Different races. Different outcomes.
Their lives illustrate the racial double standard that’s been hard-wired into the nation’s drug laws and criminal justice system since the heyday of the crack epidemic in the late 1980s and continues today.
The dichotomy is stark. When it comes to the heroin and prescription opioid epidemic, the priority is saving lives. In contrast, the remedy for crack was mass arrests and stiff prison sentences. The state of Delaware even seriously considered bringing back the whipping post to punish drug offenders.
“If the (crack) addicts were predominantly white, instead of black, we would have offered them treatment, as we do now,” said Robert M. Stutman, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration New York City office during the 1980s war against crack.
“The crack years was one of the most racist periods of our government,” he said. “And I’m white and very conservative.”
Opioids have changed the way America looks at drug users, but that hasn't changed the fact that blacks are punished more severely than whites for drug crimes, even though drug use within the two racial groups is roughly the same. To be sure, millions of whites have been arrested and prosecuted for drug crimes as well – but the black arrest rate has been and remains out of proportion to black Americans' share of the U.S. population.
Examining the records
In a yearlong investigation, the Asbury Park Press and the USA TODAY Network examined hundreds of thousands of arrest records and federal drug convictions nationwide over the past 30 years and found:
❚ Most crack users were and still are white, according to federal surveys, but blacks were sent to federal prison nearly seven times more often for crack offenses from 1991 to 2016. From 1991 through 1995, the ratio was more than 13 blacks imprisoned for every white defendant locked behind bars.
❚ Nineteen of the nation's 94 federal court districts, excluding island territories Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, didn’t send a single white defendant to federal prison on crack charges from 1991 through 1995. Among them were districts that encompass such major cities as Chicago, Indianapolis and Houston. A greater number of whites were prosecuted for crack offenses in state courts.
❚ White drug offenders have been punished less severely than blacks. Among those drug offenders with little to no prior criminal history, blacks were sent to federal prison 40 months longer on average than non-Hispanic whites for crack and cocaine possession and distribution from 1991 through 2016.
❚ Blacks weren’t just punished more severely, they were arrested far more frequently. From 1980 to 2014, the rate of drug arrests for accused black cocaine and narcotics offenders was at least twice the arrest rate of whites, and it was often much higher. FBI drug arrest data combines crack and powder cocaine offenses. Heroin and other opioids are classified as narcotics.
❚ Hispanics also have been prosecuted on federal crack charges at a higher rate than whites, though the disparity is not as great as between whites and blacks. The FBI does not track drug arrests by ethnic group.
❚ The racial disparity in drug arrests continues today. Even though heroin and prescription opioids are more deadly, there were nearly four times more arrests for cocaine than opioid drugs in 2016. In fact, far more blacks (85,640) were arrested for cocaine than whites were arrested for heroin and other opioids (66,120) that year.
❚ Blacks in 21 states were arrested at a rate at least three times higher than whites for narcotics and cocaine offenses combined in 2016. In Iowa, where black residents constitute about 4% of the population, blacks were more than 11 times as likely as whites to be arrested for cocaine or narcotics offenses. In Vermont, the ratio was more than nine times higher for blacks.
‘Lock ’em up, lock ’em up’
The racial gap in drug enforcement and sentencing is a byproduct of America’s punitive response to the crack crisis of the late ‘80s and the war on drugs it unleashed.
The signature law of that era was the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which singled out crack offenders for the most severe punishment. Under the law, possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine incurred the same five-year minimum sentence as 500 grams of powder cocaine. That 100-to-1 quantity disparity, the equivalent of 21⁄2 cups vs. 11⁄4 teaspoons of sugar, remained in place until 2010, when the federal ratio was reduced to 18 to 1.
The harshest critic of the 1986 law? The congressional staffer who helped write it.
"The racial implications of the 1986 law were devastating,” said Eric E. Sterling, then legal counsel to the House of Representative’s Subcommittee on Crime.
“If you tried (to) identify the law that in the entire history of the U.S. Congress has been the most unjust criminal law in the way that it has been applied, in which the most ... people have served scores of years of imprisonment longer than they deserved, it is the law that I helped write."
In the past 20 years, America’s thinking toward drug addiction evolved to the benefit of all groups, not just whites. The massive loss of life from opioid-related overdoses is a big reason why attitudes shifted.
“The face of crack was black and the face of the opioid crisis was white,” said Van Jones, the CNN commentator who co-founded the criminal justice reform group #cut50. “Society has had polar opposite responses.”
Since the opioid epidemic began in the late ‘90s, heroin and other opioid overdoses have killed 400,000 Americans, as many as were lost in World War II. By comparison, fewer than 10,000 fatal cocaine overdoses per year happened during the peak years of the crack epidemic, though precise death counts are hard to come by, and only a portion of those deaths involved crack.
In contrast to the more sympathetic portrayal of opioid abusers a generation later, crack users in the ‘80 and ‘90s were painted as dangerous degenerates, said Andrew Kolodny, co-director of opioid policy at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management in Waltham, Massachusetts.
“When you had drug epidemics that were concentrated in poor inner-city communities, it was easier to think that it was a cultural problem or that there was something about those people,” Kolodny said. “It was easier to view addiction as a moral failing.”
Even Major League baseball superstar Darryl Strawberry wasn’t immune from the stigma.
Strawberry, who won four World Series with the Mets and the Yankees, struggled for years in the public spotlight with drug addiction. Crack, he said, drove him to new lows – in both his personal life and his public reputation.
“It was very shameful going through it in the public eye because people would look at you and say, ‘Oh, you’re a crackhead,’ ” Strawberry, now 57, told the network. “They didn’t really understand addiction is addiction.
“The stigma was so wrong for African Americans,” said Strawberry, who is now off drugs. “They couldn’t get the help they needed because everybody looked at them as ‘less than.’
“I was looked at that way, too, even though I was Darryl Strawberry, Major League baseball player.”
In the crack era, the police had one mission: Make drug arrests.
“It was sold at the state level, ‘Lock ’em up, lock ’em up, lock ’em up.’ And that’s all we did,” said George Corbin, a retired police lieutenant in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
Today, Corbin volunteers at a local program that offers expungement services to the same people he helped arrest back in those years.
Mario Van Peebles captured the human toll of crack in his 1991 cult classic movie “New Jack City,” which was shot in Harlem.
“We shot in areas that had been infested by crack,” Van Peebles said.
Each day, when they were shooting, the response was the same. “The neighborhoods became drug-free during the time. They didn’t want us to leave. For the first time in some time, they had gotten a reprieve from this horrible affliction,” he said.
Society’s attitudes have changed a lot since the 1980s, but the racial disparity of America’s drug policies persist.
In 2010, then-President Barack Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which lowered the quantity disparity between powder cocaine and crack cocaine from a ratio of 100 to 1 to 18 to 1. The bipartisan FIRST STEP Act that President Donald Trump signed a year ago applied the reduced ratio retroactively, which led to the release of some 1,700 federal drug offenders. Despite making other criminal justice reforms, FIRST STEP left the 18-to-1 ratio in place, disappointing Sterling and other activists.
“It’s not based on science. It's not based on questions of culpability,” Sterling said of the reduced ratio.
“It was just a number that could be squeezed out of a political compromise. And it is as irrational as the original 100to-1 ratio was.”
Escaping the past
Today, Strawberry, Billups and Lapinski have turned their lives around.
Strawberry, the former baseball superstar, now spends time talking in schools and with young people struggling with drug abuse. Many of them are young and white and dealing with opioid addiction.
“The young people love me because I can relate to them and help them deal with their pain,” Strawberry said. “Addiction is about pain, it’s about trauma, it’s about rejection, it’s about a spiritual brokenness.”
Billups, who has been free of drugs for 16 years and is now happily married, is a certified drug counselor in Asbury Park.
“I’m not a crackhead anymore, I’m Mr. Billups,” he said.
Lapinski, 36, knows that he was given chances that crack users never had. And that he wasted most of them – including failing out of Drug Court before he got serious about treatment.
“I can't tell you why I did it,” said Lapinski, who’s been drug-free for three years. “I can't give you, like, an exact reason. I just made every bad choice you can make.”
But for all the success stories, there are still those who the laws won’t let escape their past.
Michelle Goodwyn is one.
Her crack addiction consumed her to the extent that she does not recall the years she gave birth to any of her four sons. She lost custody of them, as well as a daughter.
In 1998, Goodwyn, a black resident of Asbury Park, was sentenced to four years in prison for possessing what she said was $25 worth of crack. She wound up serving about a year.
She’s been drug-free for five years but says she’s been unable to find work because of her three felony drug convictions. Under New Jersey law, she’s not eligible to have her record expunged.
Goodwyn is glad that today’s epidemic is being handled more humanely, but she’s bitter about the lack of compassion America had for victims of the crack epidemic.
“All of a sudden it’s a big thing because somebody’s nephew or son died,” Goodwyn, 53, said. “But we’ve been dying for years.
“All of a sudden the white kids are starting to die so now it’s a problem. But it’s been a problem. Why didn’t they give a f--- about us?”