The Drug War on Cocaine Is a Snow Job

For years I felt guilty about not trying crack cocaine. Ever since it became the main excuse for the war on drugs and the massive jailing of black men, I thought I should try it to see if crack is as uniquely dangerous as the law says it is.

Under the mandatory crack sentence introduced in Congress in 1986 by North Carolina tobacco Sen. Jesse Helms and passed without hearings or serious debate, a dealer caught carrying 499 grams of cocaine powder could be treated lightly but someone who bought 5 grams from that dealer and put it into a microwave with baking soda and water, cooking it into crack, would be banished to a federal prison for five years without possibility of parole. More than 90% of those sentenced to federal prison for crack offenses are black, while whites predominate among powdered cocaine users. Is crack really different enough from powdered cocaine to justify a 100-to-1 disparity in sentencing?

Absolutely not, according to a definitive report in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., which establishes that crack is not in any fundamental way different in its impact than other forms of cocaine. “Cocaine is cocaine,” said Dr. Marian W. Fischman, a coauthor of the article. “Regardless of whether you shoot it up or smoke it or snort it, it has the same stimulant effect.”

That stimulant effect can vary with the individual, as even I can attest, being one of those white guys who once did try powdered cocaine. Back in the decadent ‘70s, a magazine editor determined to increase my output on an all-night deadline project gave me some. The assembly line of my mind revved up, all right, but unfortunately the words produced were useless. Not that I noticed, since after a few frantic hours I was fast asleep. Nor have I ever again been tempted to try that horrible stuff. If I’m going to write gibberish and think it brilliant, it will be with the aid of vodka, which is legal and relatively cheap.

However, let the record show, I didn’t rush out and rob a bank or attempt to wrestle a dozen cops to the ground. Evidently, millions of others have had the same lackluster, if dismal, experience. Ten years ago, there were 7.1 million occasional users of cocaine in its various forms; by last year the number had dropped to 2.5 million. What has not changed is the number of “frequent users,” defined by the federal authorities as those who ingest cocaine at least once a week: it remains a scant 0.3% of the population. Many of those people need help and should get it, but there is no cocaine epidemic sweeping across the country, not even among the subset of cocaine users who consume it in the crack form: their number remains unchanged since 1988.

Clearly, too many do suffer in ways small and immense from cocaine, although the number is dwarfed by the tens of millions who abuse alcohol. But the personal and societal costs of cocaine are magnified by the drug war, which has introduced the opportunity for immense profit in illicit sales and, as a direct result, a wave of crime in inner city communities. One real price is the imprisonment of a significant portion of black youth because of a clearly racist law. That and the maiming and death of many others in a fight over profits, which would not be there if crack were treated as a medical problem.

Addiction to cocaine--crack or powder--need not be a hopeless condition. The record indicates that cocaine abuse can be treated more easily than alcohol or heroin abuse. One major contribution of the medical association report is to demonstrate that crack, being cocaine, is also amenable to such treatment administered by health professionals rather than by prison guards: “Those addicted individuals who are incarcerated for the sale or possession of cocaine are better served by treatment than prison.” the JAMA report states. But treatment is the impoverished casualty of the misplaced military emphasis of the drug war. Indeed, even in prisons, drug rehabilitation is available to only 10% of inmate addicts.

No matter, the JAMA report will be ignored and we will continue to lock people up in ever greater numbers because science and logic have never had much impact on the anti-drug generals who run the war. Those who make their living and gain status in the upper echelons of the drug war evidently have as much to lose from a sane policy as those who sell the stuff.