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. 
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MAP posted-by: Mike Gogulski