Editorial: Moving toward sense in coke and crack sentencing

There's nothing particularly strategic about America's war on drugs. It
pours huge sums into an interdiction machine that seeps like a sieve. It
gives short shrift to the very tactics research, prevention and
treatment that might curb addictive appetites. And perhaps worst of all,
this war shoots its biggest bullets at its smallest enemies: It punishes
pennyante crack users far more harshly than bigtime cocaine suppliers. As
the Clinton administration has at last conceded, such unequal treatment is
as senseless as it is cruel. Congress is to blame for this terrible
sentencing flaw, and must now rush to fix it.

The sentencing gap dates back to the 1980s, when Congress sought to stifle
the growing fascination with crack the smokable form of cocaine. Though
the drug is no more addictive or dangerous when smoked than when snorted as
powder, lawmakers feared crack's links to innercity crime. They responded
with sentencestiffening laws, including one that required a mandatory
fiveyear prison stint for possession of 5 grams of crack.

That's enough crack to fit on a fingernail. A dealer of powder cocaine
would have to be caught with 500 grams of the stuff 100 times as much
to face the same fiveyear sentence. That's enough to fill an ample pocket.
Thus the consumer gets smashed, while the wholesaler only gets slapped.

The results of this policy have been dramatic, but hardly salutary. It has
forced federal judges to forsake their own best judgment and impose wildly
harsh sentences on the pettiest of criminals. It has packed federal prisons
with relatively harmless crack aficionados most of whom happen to be
AfricanAmerican. It has diverted resources from more productive antidrug
strategies. And it has tarred the U.S. justice system's reputation for
fairness.

All this seems to be pricking the consciences of Attorney General Janet
Reno and White House Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey though it's taken them a
while to get worked up. The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Commission
recommended closing the crackcoke gap two years ago. Now Reno and
McCaffrey are also urging a change. Yet they still do not advocate the most
logical reform scratching the disparity altogether. They'd just shrink
it to a fiveyear term for selling either 25 grams of crack or 250 grams of
powder still a 10to1 disparity.

That's better than nothing. But it's hard to see the sense in merely
narrowing a gap that ought to be closed entirely. After all, a big gap
hasn't worked any of the expected marvels on crack's popularity or
availability. Why should a small gap work any better? Indeed, it's worth
wondering whether imprisonment can play any positive role in dampening the
drug trade. But if Congress can't bring itself to wonder about that, it
must at least heed the demands of justice. It must revise crack and coke
sentences to assure equal treatment under the law.

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