The 'Jim Crow' Injustice of Crack Cocaine Continues

Bingo.

Crack was causing all kinds of problems on the streets. It is not a coincidence that the introduction of crack happened about the same time as a sharp increase in gang activity. There was tremendous outcry to do something about it. They enacted these penalties. Now people want to b**** about the legislation people demanded at the time.

 

if we are going to look at the differences in sentences of users, to me the argument AGAINST longer sentences is if someone's not going to be clean after 1 or 2 years in prison, does locking them up longer really help them get clean

 

I also believe that there should be very different treatment for addicts than there is for dealers.

 

The initial article seems to indicate that the people who bear the brunt of the punishment are "low level street dealers", not users.

I would be interested in looking at a homogeneous country with no racial divide to examine how they deal with similar problems of poverty without the lens of race distorting the issue. In these threads I spend a whole lot of time writing things, second guessing what I've written, and erasing it to write something else.

I mean, it seems clear to me that the whole social situation that creates street dealers slinging rock and fighting over territory can be much more disruptive to the community where they happen than some other models of distribution (thanks, The Wire) and thus needs a harsher punishment. I also think that the issue is to address the long term solution is to deal with the social/cultural problems. I think the problem comes if people see jail as the total sum of the solution to the problem, as opposed to triage prior to the real fix.

 

There is no difference a drug is a drug.They should be treated equal.

 

But they aren't equal.

 

Again, you keep talking about all the smokers who have a cigarette a couple of times a year.

My practical real world experience shows something else. I know a ton of people who smoke cigarettes daily. Even more who don't. And not a whole lot in between.

And if there are abundant casual cocaine users like you claim, the idea of reducing the cost from $50/dose to $.50/dose will completely eliminate them from the face of the earth.

Though if you go back and look at tobacco company literature in the heyday, they certainly do everything possible to make you think that 99% of the people who smoke are casual smokers, and that the addict smokers are a minuscule minority, emphasized by the evil anti smoking forces to make a good all-American industry look bad.

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But if it makes you feel any better, it is equally illogical when some college kid decides to binge drink. And he certainly isn't an alcoholic. Heavy intoxication seems to be a fundamental animal drive of the human condition. Addiction would be to drug taking like pedophilia is to normal heterosexual sexual urges. It is a derangement of natural and normal pleasure seeking impulses. And in no way shape or form are those pleasure seeking impulses subverted in any appreciable way by logic.

The primary problem with nicotine or cocaine or similar stimulants is that it is much easier to cross from normal biological impulses to deranged onanistic repetitive button-pressing.