Pubdate: 4 Mar 1999 Source: Arizona Daily Star (AZ) Contact: http://www.azstarnet.com/ AMERICA'S CRACK NIGHTMARE In the 1980s, crack cocaine terrorized America. News magazine covers blared its dangers. It was blamed (inaccurately, it was later determined) for the death of college basketball star Len Bias. NBC labeled crack "America's drug of choice." Experts compared it to the bubonic plague. Newsweek called it "the most addictive drug known to man." Then-drug czar William Bennett warned crack might soon invade every home in America. Now, America is living with the results of the crack epidemic. Its legacy is a far-reaching nightmare, as was reported Sunday and Monday by The New York Times. The major components of that nightmare: America's prisons are bulging with a record number of inmates, the states are shifting money from higher education to prisons, police forces have become more militaristic with heavily armed (and occasionally dangerous) SWAT teams and prisons have become even more racially imbalanced. Drug use, however, has not gone down. Chalk up one more devastating and expensive failure in the War on Drugs. The crack hysteria in the 1980s had a factual foundation. Violent crime went up as gangs fought over turf. Murder rates increased. Incapacitated "crack babies" led frightened authorities to predict a generation of babies with severe emotional and physical disorders. However, those effects were short-lived. Crack use was never widespread. Marijuana, for instance, has 18 times the number of users as crack. The violence of the crack trade dissipated. Crack now appears to be less addictive than tobacco or alcohol. But the nation still must contend with the results of its hysterical reaction to the feared crack scourge. The most devastating of those results is the huge increase in the number of people being imprisoned on drug charges - and the concomitant huge shift in the number of blacks being imprisoned. America now has more than 400,000 people in prison for drug offenses - more than are in prison for all crimes in England, France, Germany and Japan combined. No country has more people in prison than America. Only one, Russia, puts a higher percentage of its population in prison. Of course, this is expensive. Pennsylvania's corrections budget has increased fivefold in a decade. California spends $4 billion a year to operate its prison system, the nation's largest. Drug czar Barry McCaffrey estimates the nation could save $5 billion a year by offering drug users treatment programs rather than jail cells. Moreover, these prisoners are not violent criminals. Mostly they are small-time drug users and dealers. Drug offenders make up more than half of all federal prisoners, and they are a significant proportion of state prisoners. Their drug of choice is not crack, but marijuana. More people are sentenced for marijuana than for any other drug. Even more disturbing, one of every 20 Americans born this year will serve time in prison as a result of the nation's drug laws. For blacks, the estimate is one in four. Clearly, the overreaction to crack has done more damage to America than the drug ever did. With such a huge social problem facing the country, what are the politicians doing and saying? Nothing. The debate on heavier prison sentences and drug laws has been stilled for a decade. But there are obvious solutions. * Provide drug and alcohol treatment to substance-abusing prisoners. Most prisoners need drug treatment. Few receive it. In Arizona, 85 percent of inmates need treatment. Only 8 percent receive it. * Provide treatment to drug users as an alternative to prison. Reserve long prison sentences for big-time dealers. * Eliminate mandatory prison sentences for drug offenses and eliminate the "three-strikes" laws that sometimes imprison people for minor crimes. These laws have left judges little more than spectators in their own courtrooms. * Eliminate the discrepancy in powder cocaine and crack sentencing, which can see a person with 5 grams of crack getting an automatic five-year prison term while somebody with 5 grams of powder cocaine might be turned loose. * Consider decriminalizing marijuana, which by far is Americans' illegal drug of choice. Given the political climate, it is unlikely any of these reforms will be accepted in Arizona or the nation. But they should be. They would help end the nation's drug nightmare. - --- MAP posted-by: Mike Gogulski