STATE WILL PAY FOR HARSH DRUG LAWS

'I regret." Once again, we hear this shameful wail of the squanderer from
the very lips of a power broker splattered with the blood of the nation's
youth.

This time it is John R. Dunne, the former New York state senator who three
decades ago helped erect the draconian Rockefeller drug laws. "I regret
that as chairman of the State Senate Committee on Crime and Corrections, I
was one of the original sponsors of these laws when they were proposed by
Gov. Nelson Rockefeller," Dunne wrote in the op-ed section of The New York
Times. Before hearing further from this menace to society, let's consider
the human devastation of his handiwork and its chief architect whose name
stamps this judicial miscarriage.

It was personal with Rockefeller when, in 1973, he pushed through the
Legislature the most severe set of strictures against selected citizens
caught with drugs. The son of a friend of the millionaire governor's had
become addicted to heroin. The shattering of the man's rich family over his
misfortune reportedly broke Rockefeller's heart. "It was so close to the
governor that he really had a very personal reason for the degree of
severity," Warren Anderson, a retired official, was quoted as saying.

This is how the ruling class works. The 1970s heroin epidemic among the
poor of New York City, including thousands of overdose deaths, could not
thaw the heart of the sitting governor. It should not pass unnoted here
that much of this flood of hard drugs was pumped into black and Latino
communities by corrupt cops and officials in an unholy alliance with
criminals organized and freelance. Still, it took an individual tragedy
close to Rockefeller personally to bolt him into action. In drafting his
tough anti-drug laws, Rockefeller was likely bent more on vengeance for his
close friend's family than on effective judicial remedies for the masses.

No matter, the resulting Rockefeller drug laws established mandatory prison
sentences for possession and sale of hard drugs keyed to the weight of the
drug involved. The statutes generally require judges to impose a sentence
of 15 years to life for anyone convicted of selling two ounces or
possessing four ounces of "narcotic drugs." Marijuana was later removed
from the list of substances covered, effectively decriminalizing its use
and the simple possession of less than seven-eighths of an ounce. During
the crack epidemic in 1988, the threshold for triggering the mandatory
15-to-life sentence, however, was lowered to allow for the prosecution of
persons possessing even small amounts of cocaine.

Such laws have filled state prisons for three decades with low-level drug
users, many in the experimental stage. Judges are afforded little
discretion over whether a defendant will be sent away for 15 years. The
mechanical trigger keys strictly on the amount of drugs seized. The use of
violence, a chief community concern in drug-infested neighborhoods, is not
a factor. Thus, thousands of nonviolent, casual drug users have been
sacrificed on the altar of Rockefeller's blind and heartless drug laws.

The laws also dished out these harsh sentences without allowing for
mitigating circumstances of the offense or for the defendant's character or
background. Whereas a judge would normally consider these matters along
with whether the individual was a first-time offender, the Rockefeller laws
slammed shut all such doors. Faced with such inflexible measures, the
selective New York police work and the racial filtration of the judicial
system not unexpectedly spared the dominant society's sons and daughters
and issued up disproportionate numbers of blacks and Latinos to be chewed
up by the unforgiving Rockefeller beast.

"I particularly regret the disproportionate impact the enforcement of these
laws has had on minority communities," Dunne wrote. "Despite the
consistency of drug use among all races and at all socio-economic levels,
over 94 percent of incarcerated drug offenders in New York prisons are
African American and Latino. The majority of them, not surprisingly, come
from New York's poorest and most underserved communities. Instead of
investing in education and services that would improve people's lives, we
have chosen to invest in prisons."

Dunne has placed himself beside no lesser a menace than former Secretary of
Defense Robert Strange McNamara. After gleefully prosecuting the Vietnam
war that killed hundreds of thousands and wrecked millions of lives,
McNamara admitted in his 1995 biography "we were wrong, terribly wrong. We
owe it to future generations to explain why."

With the devil thumbing through the c. vitae of these two discredited
policymakers, they attempt to clear their names and bloodied hands. What
indeed must the state do to right the wrong committed against the current
generation of blacks and Latinos? Both groups have been destabilized by a
drug policy that has unfairly locked away scores of their best and
brightest and most certainly their most courageous and energetic youth.

The Rockefeller drug laws are yet another state act running up the toll for
reparations. It is a bill the republic will one day be forced to pay.