22 years ago on June 19, 1986, College Basketball star Len Bias had it all. He was a pretty good basketball player. Scratch that. He was a pretty great basketball player. I mean he was going to be like Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing. He was supposed to be the next big player. He was drafted by the Boston Celtics, who had just won the NBA Championship and he would undoubtedly continue to lead the team to further greatness. Then he died of a crack overdose.
When a tragedy like this happens – especially to one so young talented and full of life as Len Bias – it triggers a lot of solemn, negative emotions in a lot of people. This is perfectly understandable. Unfortunately, in this case, the negativity of it all did not end there. In this case people used those negative emotions to deal further harm. It was following this incident that Congress took swift action to pass a 1:100 sentencing ratio of Crack to regular powder Cocaine. This meant that while possession of 5 grams of Crack triggers a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, the same sentence is triggered when one possesses 500 grams of Cocaine in the powder form.
Given that a big-time celebrity had just died of the drug, a crackdown on Crack may have seen like Conventional Wisdom at the time, but it is definitely far from Common Sense. Crack and Cocaine are the SAME drug! They are grown from the SAME plant, trafficked in the SAME shipment and delivered to the SAME buyers at the SAME time. The difference between the two is the form that it takes and the manner in which it is typically ingested. Crack is typically smoked. Cocaine is typically snorted. The drug is of varying levels of danger to the one who ingests, but this depends mainly on factors such as purity and whether it has been cut/laced. The form that it is in is not the issue. It’s actually all Cocaine and only the final part of the process is what converts it into the Crack form. Read the rest of this entry »
