I wish the National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy would stop to consider the implications of his own words. As he acknowledges, under The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, possession of 5 grams of crack or 500 grams of powder cocaine were treated the same way: a mandatory prison sentence of five years was imposed. Now, consider the practical difference. A group of white suburban teenagers might purchase an “eight-ball” of coke to have some fun on a Saturday night. Possession of two eight-balls would be equal to possession of seven grams of powder cocaine. In other words, someone who brought a slightly more than average amount of coke to a party would have been subject to a five-year sentence if powder cocaine had been treated the way that crack was. Looked at another way, possession of five grams of crack was not a true indicator that someone was a a significant narcotics dealer, or a dealer at all. A crack addict might buy five or more grams at a time for simple convenience, or because they were buying some for their friends, too. So, the disparity wasn’t just that crack-dealing and coke-dealing were treated differently, but that the crack sentences netted a lot of people who were mere addicts or, at worst, couriers. Casual users of cocaine did not commonly possess 500 grams of it at any one time. Casual users of crack often possessed 5 grams at one time.
That’s why the following is so myopic:
Holder carefully talks about “non-violent” drug “offenders.” Obama riffs about “kids or individual users” supposedly “lock[ed] up . . . for long stretches of jail time.” You are left to imagine poor addicts who never hurt anyone but themselves, languishing for decades in some super-max prison. Yet federal drug enforcement targets felony drug dealers, not simple possession of drugs — the latter is left to the states. Mere users of marijuana and crack are not wasting away in federal penitentiaries. Moreover, an offender sentenced under a mandatory-minimum provision has necessarily committed a significant narcotics felony; the felony distribution of minor amounts of narcotics is not subject to a mandatory minimum, and judges maintain discretion to sentence those offenders to little or no jail time. Obama and Holder are talking about freeing what could amount to thousands of serious criminals.
Again, five grams of crack is a minor amount of narcotics, which is largely the point. McCarthy also dismisses the whole notion of “disparate impact” since white crack dealers were treated the same as black crack dealers. In addition to the fact that even this isn’t true, it is impossible to imagine that white suburban parents would have tolerated seeing their college-bound sons and daughters sentenced to five years in prison over possession of a couple of eight-balls. They call blacks a racial minority for a reason. They make up less than 20% of the population, and they are therefore less capable of using their political weight to change laws they find outrageous. White parents could live with sentencing guidelines that only impacted folks who possessed 500 grams of coke. They didn’t know any one like that, and those people were serious drug dealers. Black folks didn’t like the crack epidemic and would have supported tough sentencing for serious crack pushers. But that’s not what existed.
Andrew McCarthy says that President Obama is subverting the law by soliciting applications for commutation from people who received too-harsh sentences, but he doesn’t understand that too-harsh sentences actually occurred on a regular basis.
Once again, it is white people who are the real victims here, amirite?
McCarthy is a prosecutor. Follow his wallet. He’d have no problem increasing the sentencing on every crime on the book, I suspect. He’s one of the most authoritarian writers the NRO has, and that’s saying something.
Federal drug enforcement targets persons who will be easy to convict and sentence to prison, to bump up their performance statistics. Just try to prosecute Boss Hogg’s little precious for peddling 2 kg of powder when it’s much easier to pick up 100 kids with over 5 g of crack and plea-bargain them into lifetime without parole over several recividism cycles.
And it’s very easy to plant 5 g of crack on someone you just want out of the way for a while. Especially if the Feds are working with local cops on the take.
Federal drug enforcement targets what the law allows them to target and more.
The legal issue with drug laws is that it provides an ever-present way of corrupting a police force.
The same with prostitution, gambling, and pornography laws.
A kilo goes for 12-22 grand on the coast depending on purity and location. You have to know someone massive to get it, and that’s the level at which killing people is worth it. You’re talking organized crime at that point.
Perhaps, or maybe we have to think about the way we think about organized crime. Is a group of college age white kids selling drugs to each other organized crime? Or does it turn into organized crime once they kill someone?
In this story, the kid says he pulled in 15k a month from selling potand other drugs were always around.
This is how most drug networks work for young white people, it’s people they go to school with. And it’s an informal network. Unlike street dealers who would need to hustle to get that 11-20k, who owe other people, who basically work on a sharecropping system.. these young adults have easy access to it, no need to wait for capital in that way, and an open market.
Please also see, Why rich college kids can sell dope and you can’t
Dorm Room Dealers: Drugs and the Privileges of Race and Class
It still ships from organized crime. That takes connections to get. I know how drug networks work. To get bulk, you need either the source (farmer, chemist, Columbian connection), or the crime syndicates that buy from them and trickle it down from there.
It’s organized and well run. Though the people you encounter to get bulk and the great rates that go with it are dangerous. Those people are usually involved in prostitution, weapons trafficking, extortion and all sorts of other stuff. But generally the nastier and more violent the crime level, the more professional they and the more they have their shit together.
The college kid might not be involved in weapons and human trafficking, the person who sells kilos and buys them in bulk is for damn certain. You just learn to tolerate it, in fact that’s a good sign they are very reliable, can be trusted, and aren’t going to fuck anything up.
Actually there is some logic behind this. Just as there is logic behind charging heroin as a greater crime than vicoden or opium.
I grew up in Washington DC and the greater area in the 80s/90s during the crack epidemic. The menacing from crack wasn’t so much about the drug, but the massive amount of crime and violence that stemmed from it. To put it quite bluntly, your average person who smoked opium, popped pills, blew coke, smoked pot, did acid, or dropped X (which wasn’t even fully illegal at the time) wasn’t running around with a hoddie/face mask sticking up bodegas at night, robbing people at gun point in alleys, or breaking into houses. Nor were the average dealers involved in random shootings over territory that killed kids on the next block or landed bullets in a public park.
On the other hand the violence in the crack, heroin, and meth trade was off the charts. People were robbing bodegas left and right, robbing cars at gun points, breaking into houses for money and raping people while they were at it. The dealers were having regular shootouts over turf, and parts of DC were a shooting gallery.
That’s what it was always about. I’ll also note that X turned into a major issue once it became clear to the world plus dog that any electronic music night club, yes white people clubs, were little more than open air X shops and orgies. Once violence started to hit those places and women ended up prostituting themselves there the DEA started raiding clubs that were overwhelmingly white (I was there when Nations/Buzz was raided and on Fox 5 news) and the penalties flew through the roof. I have several white friends still in prison now, over a decade and a half later for X charges once it was decided that X at raves was just as much of a problem as crack at hip-hop clubs.
The pattern is clear, when drug use is just drug use and the collateral issues are minimal, nobody gives a shit. But once it hits the point where people are prostituting themselves, committing armed robber, or killing people the population freaks out, and creates penalties around that item.
That’s why I’m in favor of complete legalization of everything, because the way to avoid the carnage is to take the profits out and offer drugs to the addicted through government rehab.
In the 1920s and 1930s in Chicago and many other cities, there were turf wars and crime related to alcohol. Ending prohibition took the steam out of that and the gangs had to turn to other businesses. Among those businesses in the 1950s was heroin.
The population freaks out when the media freaks out and politicians are looking for an issue to run on. Alcohol prohibition, reefer madness, drug scares of the 1960s, crack cocaine, and then X all provided that sure addictive fix in the voting booth. Each occurred by the way when the folks who got elected might not have gotten elected otherwise and each was surrounded with more than a hint of ethnic bigotry or elected politicians who sought to preserve some forms of discrimination.
That’s why I feel everything, including cocaine/heroin/meth, should be decriminalized at the least, legalized at best.
I don’t think it’s all ethnic bigotry though. X was a problem with upper class whites. Despite all the “peace, love, unity, respect” aka PLUR mantra of the rave scene, it was all about hardcore drug use (taking 10+ hits of X at once and blacking out in orgies in the club was really damn common, any time people claim shit is about peace and love you know it’s all about sex and money). All it took was a few ODs, the realization that upper class white college girls were fucking to pay for tuition, and a small amount of violence to cause a massive freakout. MDMA/MDA went from legal, to misdemeanor to felony really fast and the DEA was everywhere all of a sudden. Or take meth, that’s another white problem and it’s currently the biggest drug issue we face.
Ultimately most people are fine with drug use. Right until the side effects of it (prostitution, robbery, theft, gun violence, gang violence, dropping out of school) affect someone they know. Then there is a freak out and something must be done. But that something is more about revenge than actually solving the problem.
It’s whack a mole though. When crack was “under control” meth use went through the roof. When there was a crackdown on perscription opiates heroin flooded the area. The crack down on X lead to a massive influx of GHB, acid, and some very dangerous designer drugs. Arresting the Jewish and Russian organized crime syndicates weakened them enough for some brutal Mexican and South American cartels to make inroads. Taking on black gangs opened the door for Asian gangs to come in.
The only way they managed to “get things under control” was to gentrify the city and push the lower income residents out into MD and VA and bus them into the city to work. Thus, the crime is off DC’s books and not their problem now. The drug trade is entirely high end clients and highly connected dealers. It’s strictly professional, and there is very little shooting going on. Though it’s an open secret that you can go into just about any club or bar in Dupont Circle (highly trendy area of DC and the gay district as well) and score any substance really easy and not a damn thing will happen.
Normalizing Drug Use
The drug policy battle in the U.S. isn’t about medical marijuana, or even legalizing marijuana.
It’s about normalizing drug use.
Do drugs create different experiences from other involvements we are familiar with–are they more compelling, more inescapable, less controllable, more inexorable in their progression to addiction than other experiences that we encounter daily?
They are not.
Thanks for linking to this. I’m a big fan of Carl Hart’s work, simply because he’s one of the few neuroscientists in America who actually has first-hand experience with the drugs he studies on voluntary human subjects. That’s a big deal, because he’s no longer theorizing about what happens in the lives of habitual users, he’s actually doing controlled studies to get data.
Carl Hart Explains His Drug Research Lab http://bigthink.com/ideas/carl-hart-explains-his-drug-research-lab
Humans have always attempted to alter their consciousness and we need to come to grips with that in America. But like the idea of “safe sex” before it, we seem to be addicted to the idea that there’s only one way to handle “temptation”, avoid it all together and then punish when we can’t avoid it.
I’m glad we’re having this discussion, I didn’t grow up in Washington, DC. I grew up in the South in the projects during the 80s/89s, but the version of history you’re explaining here doesn’t mesh up with mine. It’s got some of the details, but not the overarching picture of how race really is a driving factor in drugs. You think the disparities made sense, but even folks in the black community who lobbied for those laws recognized how their fervor also crippled their own communities (Sharpton, Butts, Jackson, Morial, several members of the CBC).
With the onslaught of crack, I definitely noticed it seemed like the wild wild west. I had an aunt that was addicted to crack for 10 years and it devastated our entire family, so I’m not going easy on crack at all.
But the idea that it was necessary to lock people up and rob their communities for years to come and to gentrify in order to make the city safe is “craft”, it’s the magic of justifying outcomes. That doesn’t explain why crack became a black drug, even though 66% of it’s users are white. Most white people buy from white dealers, so that doesn’t explain why over 40% of the people locked up for crack are black. Since black men in particular make up about 6.6% of the population throughout the country. And it doesn’t explain why if crack was so prevalent in the 80s, the DEA had to set up a drug buy a bust a crack dealer near the white house. If crack is everywhere, you ain’t got to fake the funk.
I also challenge your view of the violence of the drug war, not saying drive bys weren’t happening and violence didn’t increase. I’m simply saying that dealers were murdering each other in a similar ways. I’ve seen tons of documentaries about 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s drug usage (I wasn’t born during this time, but based on my readings, I think they are pretty accurate). It’s my understanding that during the 40s-60s New York an several other major cities were really worried about heroin and cocaine addicts precisely because of violence, killing, etc.
There are 3 documentaries that highlight this Cocaine Cowboys (drug use in the 80s before the crack explosion), Drug Wars – the Columbian Cartels a frontline program, and you can check out this article from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Deliquency, which directly shows that even in the 70s gangs were considered a “violent problem” with no crack involved. The data here says, maybe you didn’t see that violence in your neighborhood yet, but it’s always been there.
There are so many American Gangster documentaries, and many of them focus on drug dealers that were directly brutal and involved in cocaine and heroin, like Nicky Barnes, Frank Lucas, Felix Mitchell, etc.
Not my evidence. Because based on the data I have seen, even though white people commit more crimes simply because there are more white people. The evidence is that most people, but especially most white people who sell and use drugs will never be caught or arrested. Their lives won’t be derailed, their communities won’t be robbed of men who are between the prime working ages, and they won’t ever have to deal with felonies on their records for selling or using drugs that will exclude them from housing and education opportunities. The collateral damage of MDMA is way minimal compared to Alcohol, so is LSD, so are mushrooms, so are a number of drugs I could name off and they still carry heavy federal time. That’s what science says, not our emotions, not news reports inducing panic. It also seems cray to me that in a very large amount of MDMA related deaths, the drug involved isn’t MDMA at all but instead an analog or a synthetic drug. Very few people would need to “prostitute” themselves for MDMA since:
I’d also like to find the studies that show people are more likely to rape on Crack, MDMA, or Cocaine than they are for alcohol. I haven’t seen any.
How do you explain weed arrests and the harshness of that? Dudes aren’t out on the street shooting each other over weed on a regular basis. Yet, we have tons of people in state and federal prisons going to jail for weed and not kilos, but like literally ounces. People aren’t exactly out on the streets killing over MDMA, but it’s got a crazy long federal sentence and that has less to do with actual white girls at orgies passing out and more to do with propaganda about white girls at orgies passing out.
Uhh.. no disrespect to you but crack was never a recreational drug like E in the black community. There’s so much data on that. People really saw/see crack users are the worst and lowest rung of society — crack was never accepted in our communities as a fun party drug. People who were using crack at clubs could never be out in the open about it like people did/currently do at raves. It was just not as acceptable as E is and it never has been.
We are both in favor of legalization, but I can’t agree with legitimizing a view that isn’t backed by data. The data says that the drug war is seriously racial in it’s enforcement, even if it wasn’t intended to be legislated as such.
Booman, again thanks for addressing this issue!
I grew up around crack. I never sold it, but I had “friends” who did. I served on a jury last year where people who hadn’t seen crack before, didn’t know about crack, but heard the horror stories. They were amazed at just how little you needed to possess to go to jail for years.