What Should Be Done About Federal Cocaine Laws?

The "war on drugs" has been an ongoing part of our history as Americans for a number of years, and certainly since the 1980s, when the drug cocaine was brought to our attention and then widely and quickly distributed amongst our communities. Opinions and arguments in favor of the federal cocaine laws are numerous, as are the reactions against such laws. In the spirit of Americans faced with a problem large enough to be dubbed a "war," we have managed to find someone to blame for the problems we have created by using and selling cocaine. Who do we target with these laws? African Americans.

People like Michael Coyle, a research associate with The Sentencing Project, say that African Americans are disproportionately targeted with these federal laws, while Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy argues that no such discrimination exists. While my views of race discrimination are usually more pronounced toward the positive, in this case, I am not convinced that these federal cocaine laws discriminate against blacks to the extent that merits the problem to be called a "war." As with other issues, like the "war" on terror, or the "war" on crime, it seems that with this issue the idea is the same: to get people interested and convinced that a giant problem exists, when in reality the answers are not as clear-cut as the implications point out.

Kevin A. Sabet says that to argue that these federal laws openly discriminate against African Americans doesn't add up, arguing that, because it is a federal law, its basis only applies when someone is "apprehended and prosecuted by federal authorities" (Sabet 183). Those cases are very rare-in fact, from 2002 to 2005, there were only a grand total of 68 people federally-prosecuted. 68? That doesn't seem to merit an overhaul on the cocaine laws, regardless of what race those 68 people were.

While there is undoubtedly a baseline within the federal government concerning cocaine laws, individual states are another story entirely. State laws vary greatly, and I argue that it makes sense that we perceive a problem with cocaine and people abusing it, because of two reasons. As individual states, our laws will naturally vary, which in turn would create just as much variation and interpretation of those laws as a result. With that subsequent variation in our interpretation, those many decisions then make their way into the public ear, we distort them to fit our own desires and wishes, and suddenly we have a "war" on drugs, and African Americans are our enemy.

In reality, a majority of states "don't differentiate between powder and crack offenses" (Sabet 184), unlike the federal laws decree. Sabet cites a study done in 2004 by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, illustrating that because of the closeness of the numbers, rampant discrimination simply does not exist. The study found that, of those individuals convicted of possessing powder cocaine, just over 1.5 million were white, while only about 350,000 were African Americans (Sabet 184). Even ten years earlier, in 1994, the same group (powder cocaine offenders) was found to be 30% African American, and 26% white-only a 4% difference. While Sabet does say that the numbers for crack cocaine laws are often found to be disproportionate, the laws that these numbers were based on went by the state laws, not the federal laws. As for the laws discussed in the study, in terms of crack cocaine, the percentages between whites and blacks were "47% and 41%, respectively" (Sabet, 184).

At any rate, so many numbers are floating around from different studies, and all those numbers represent different ideals and agendas. I argue that these laws aren't discriminatory to the degree that detractors say they are, and thus they should not be amended to an extreme degree that has been proposed by many.
If a "war" on drugs does exist, I argue that it is merely between statistics, and not between whites and blacks in terms of who is using the drugs and who isn't. Like countless other issues, in order to get everyone invested in it, we feel it necessary to pit two groups against each other, no matter what.

Works Cited

Sabet, Kevin. A. "Making It Happen: The Case for Compromise in the Federal Cocaine Law Debate." Social Policy & Administration 39:2 (2005): 181-191.