Congress narrows gap in cocaine sentences

[blu]

Congress narrows gap in cocaine sentences | NOLA.com

Congress on Wednesday changed a quarter-century-old law that has subjected tens of thousands of black people to long prison terms for crack cocaine convictions while giving far more lenient treatment to those, mainly white people, caught with the powder form of the drug.

I can't believe they did something right!

 

[FA_Q2]

Wow, I am surprised. This is a move in the right direction.

 

[R.C. Christian]

It's about damn time. Now there is change you can believe in.

 

[Article 15]

This is a move in the right direction.

Agreed.

The gap is still wrong, IMO, but at least it's getting smaller.

 

[Tank]

Black people love smoking crack.

 

[editec]

Black people love smoking crack.

Are people still smoking crack?

I thought the new speed high was made by Americans FOR Americans good old USA manufactured crank.

 

[Douger]

Black people love smoking crack.

Are people still smoking crack?

I thought the new speed high was made by Americans FOR Americans good old USA manufactured crank.

Yessiree. Made in murka !! #1 !

 

[topspin]

I certainly agree with 18 times less for a rich guy snorting powder. 100 times less for the rich guy is too lenient.

 

[Mad Scientist]

I agree. Blacks people should be able to smoke as much crack as they want without fear of retribution. Keeps them enslaved.

 

[Barb]

Black people love smoking crack.

Plenty of white people smoke crack. They aren't arrested at the same rate, and they aren't demonized by the media and government.

Similar to the ways poverty and antipoverty programs such as needs based welfare were racialized by government and the media starting in the 1960s and intermittently through the 1980s and beyond, so too were the issues of drug abuse and crime racialized during the crack cocaine explosion of the 1980s. Comparable to poverty coverage of white and black populations are the class and racial components of the treatment of cocaine use as a status of luxury when it was mostly a white and rich persons drug of choice, and later when the means of delivery and ingestion made it less expensive to sell to a wider and poorer consumer base.

Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy The University of Chicago Press, 1999, 104-108 and 154-168
Michael Agar, Addiction Research & Theory: The Story Of Crack: Towards A Theory Of Illicit Drug Trends. 27pFeb2003, Vol. 11 Issue 1, p3-29, retrieved May 15, 2010 from Empire State College - Login

Contrary to popular belief, Parry noted that the introduction of crack did not institute increased dug abuse. Heroine and powdered cocaine were already common, and often used in tandem in the form of “speedballing” by IV drug users. Neither did crack use predominantly begin as a problem in African-American neighborhoods, although it was most visibly depicted as such by the national news media.

However, the socially constructed image clearly shifts in the mid-eighties. In his history of dug policy, Baum notes that, by the end of 1985, media no longer show the cocaine user as white, rich, attractive and tragic. Now the user is black or Hispanic, and menacing as well.

Robert Parry, Salon.com How John Kerry exposed the Contra-cocaine scandal, 25 October 2004, retrieved May 15, 2010 from How John Kerry exposed the Contra-cocaine scandal - Salon.com 6

The war on drugs intensified in response to media portrayals of frightening black gang members and irresponsible welfare mothers smoking crack while pregnant. These were the public faces of the crack cocaine epidemic, and in response to the fear and disgust generated, the sentencing guidelines became stricter for the crack form of cocaine while sentencing for powdered cocaine remained at pre-crack levels. Budget allocations for the war on drugs were 50% more for incarceration and punishment than for treatment or prevention, and the war on the growth industry of the 1980s inner cities became a very profitable growth industry in itself.

Michelle Alexander explained the racial motivation of the Reagan Revolution regarding the administrations’ focus in the “War on Drugs:”

President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action.

Alexander went on to assess how successful in re-segregating and disenfranchising the black population these policies were.
• More black people are in prison or parole today than were slaves in 1850.
• “Felon disenfranchisement laws” effectively and legally evade the Fifteenth Amendment.
• Coupled with the label of “felons for life,” these laws also permit discrimination in housing, employment, education, and deny participation in the political and justice systems that decide the fates of those so branded, and the fate of their children.
• Because of the enormously high rate of imprisonment of black fathers, and increasingly of mothers, a black child today is less likely to live with both parents than they would have during slavery.
Tony Whitehead wrote about the “incarceration epidemic” in Marion Barry, the Incarceration Epidemic, and the Prison-to-Community Cultural Continuum in Washington, DC, and noted that at 6% of the US population, black males make up 70% of the population in prison or on parole, and that this has occurred even as crime rates have “steadily declined since the late 1990s.” Whitehead also noted that while consequences for individuals are well documented, less has been written about the consequences to the communities they are taken from and recycled back into, their families, or particularly their children.

Michelle Alexander, Mother Jones The New Jim Crow The New Jim Crow | Mother Jones

All this, and not ONE of the real suppliers saw a DAY of jail time, or even an indictment

In 1979, a group of Nicaraguan exiles calling themselves the Contras began to fight a guerilla war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The Reagan administration of the 1980s viewed these exiles as potentially useful in the Cold War, and President Reagan went so far as to associate them to the “founding fathers.” Because the United States Congress disagreed, it passed “Boland Amendments” restricting the types of support the administration could offer to the Contras. Specifically, these Amendments prohibited the use of CIA funds to depose the Sandinista government, and restricted U.S. Aide to the Contras to “humanitarian” relief. Michael Agar explained that the response to these restrictions by the Reagan administration included allowing, indeed protecting the entry of US relief planes loaded with powder cocaine into the United States.

The extent of U.S. involvement in cocaine trafficking in the 1980s remains in dispute. Based on past cases, it is unlikely that the CIA played an active role in developing U.S. markets. For present purposes, one thing is clear, in Central America with cocaine, just as with other cases in Southeast and Southwest Asia, political allies of the U.S., in wars against Communist regimes, used illicit drugs to raise revenue to support their efforts. When this did happen, the U.S. at least looked the other way. At the next level, U.S. logistical support was used to transport illicit drugs. One more level up, and the U.S. actively intervened to protect its allies against the efforts of other agencies, from the U.S. or other countries, to stop trafficking. All these levels were reached in the Contra case.

Michael Agar, Addiction Research & Theory: The Story Of Crack: Towards A Theory Of Illicit Drug Trends, 11-12

Robert Parry went into greater detail regarding the findings of John Kerry’s Congressional investigation into the funding of the Contras through the international cocaine trade, including the 1998 findings of CIA inspector Fredrick Hitz that the Reagan administration knew from the beginning that the CIA was working with drug traffickers in the Contra army, that these were internationally connected, that the CIA protected them from exposure and prosecution, and indicated direct connections between the flood of cocaine into the United states in the 1980s and direct orders from officials of the United States Government.

Reviewing evidence that existed in the 1980s, CIA inspector general Hitz found that some Contra-connected drug traffickers worked directly for Reagan's National Security Council staff and the CIA. In 1987, Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veteran Moises Nunez told CIA investigators that "it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC."

Robert Parry, Salon.com How John Kerry exposed the Contra-cocaine scandal, 25 October 2004, retrieved May 15, 2010 from How John Kerry exposed the Contra-cocaine scandal - Salon.com 6

 

[blu]

just ignore tank, barb, hes a troll

 

[editec]

Barb, the differentiation in laws between powdered coke and rock coke are absurb.

Nobody denies that.

And nobody who watched this happening when it first happened could doubt WHY the law is so preposterously structured, either.

Back in the 80s when we dazzling urbanites (I was living Boston then) were snorting coke, about half the people I knew were lawyers, and about half of them did coke with me.

Coke was classy, rock was trashy.

I've never understood the whole thing anyway.

Smoking powdered cocaine is easy enough to do.

You put it in a cigarette or a bowl and light it. Or, if you were a complete fool you turned your powder into free base, and then smoked that.

There is NO difference between rock and powder.

EXCEPT who sells it.

Hence the weird laws.

 

[Barb]

Barb, the differentiation in laws between powdered coke and rock coke are absurb.

Nobody denies that.

And nobody who watched this happening when it first happened could doubt WHY the law is so preposterously structured, either.

Back in the 80s when we dazzling urbanites (I was living Boston then) were snorting coke, about half the people I knew were lawyers, and about half of them did coke with me.

Coke was classy, rock was trashy.

I've never understood the whole thing anyway.

Smoking powdered cocaine is easy enough to do.

You put it in a cigarette or a bowl and light it. Or, if you were a complete fool you turned your powder into free base, and then smoked that.

There is NO difference between rock and powder.

EXCEPT who sells it.

Hence the weird laws.

The thing is, it was the government that flooded the market, and that did so at a time when wealthier people were noticing the sexual dysfunctions that prolonged use produced, among other drawbacks, The reason for the repackaging from powder to the more cost effective variant was because of that, and a shout out to the WALMART and DOLLAR STORE shoppers. It was packaged to increase the market share, and then publicly demonized in blatant disregard of who the actual pusher was.

I never said there was a difference between the two except in how it was marketed, both for sale and for public viewing, and for how the sentencing is / was carried out.

 

[blu]

The thing is, it was the government that flooded the market, and that did so at a time when wealthier people were noticing the sexual dysfunctions that prolonged use produced, among other drawbacks, The reason for the repackaging from powder to the more cost effective variant was because of that, and a shout out to the WALMART and DOLLAR STORE shoppers. It was packaged to increase the market share, and then publicly demonized in blatant disregard of who the actual pusher was.

I never said there was a difference between the two except in how it was marketed, both for sale and for public viewing, and for how the sentencing is / was carried out.

yep, the fallout of reagan and north's dealing with the contras is astounding. and of course their middle man rick ross sits in jail forever while one lived the good life until death and the other still has neocon sheep fawning over him every day.

 

[Barb]

The thing is, it was the government that flooded the market, and that did so at a time when wealthier people were noticing the sexual dysfunctions that prolonged use produced, among other drawbacks, The reason for the repackaging from powder to the more cost effective variant was because of that, and a shout out to the WALMART and DOLLAR STORE shoppers. It was packaged to increase the market share, and then publicly demonized in blatant disregard of who the actual pusher was.

I never said there was a difference between the two except in how it was marketed, both for sale and for public viewing, and for how the sentencing is / was carried out.

yep, the fallout of reagan and north's dealing with the contras is astounding. and of course their middle man rick ross sits in jail forever while one lived the good life until death and the other still has neocon sheep fawning over him every day.

And the biggest drug kingpin in the history of the US is lionized, and the underling who fell on his retractable sword hosts a program on FOX news, and while Poindexter had a brief post as the head of the arts and crafts department of homeland insecurity, and every fucking one of them roams (or roamed) free. Meanwhile, we have those here and everywhere who don't know, and couldn't care less who and what the really guilty parties are. Whatta world.