Closing the Cocaine Gap

It has taken more than two decades, but a little more fairness has come for people sentenced for possessing cocaine.

As the Associated Press explained about the change in federal law, "The measure alters a 1986 law, enacted at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, under which a person convicted of crack cocaine possession gets the same mandatory prison term as someone with 100 times the same amount of powder cocaine."

The Fair Sentencing Act, passed last week in the House of Representatives, cuts the crack-to-powder punishment ratio to 18-1. The Senate passed the bill in March. President Barack Obama has promised to sign it.

As we have noted before, in the 1980s it was commonly believed that crack cocaine was more addictive than powdered cocaine. So harsher sentences were implemented to try to reduce the numbers of people becoming addicted. But since then, research has shown that the two forms of the drug have similar addictive properties.

Moreover, the U.S.

Sentencing Commission found that the varying punishments resulted in a wide racial disparity for those imprisoned for cocaine. In 2006, 82 percent of those sentenced under the federal crack cocaine law were African-American, with 8.8 percent white. The reason is that crack cocaine enforcement concentrates on street arrests and inner cities, where many African-Americans live, and crack is more common, instead of in the suburbs, where use of powdered cocaine by whites is more common but identifying and busting users in suburban homes is more difficult.

To us, the change is a welcome development and long overdue, given the disparity of punishment and long jail sentences.

But it's only a start and just one example of the deeper problem, the overall "war on drugs," which has criminalized what in many cases should be a private matter, and caused collateral problems such as gang warfare and prison crowding.

REPRINTED FROM THE NEW BERN SUN JOURNAL.

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