By Sarah Park '21
The Senate Judiciary Committee revised legislation lead by Senator Chuck Grassley and Senator Dick Durbin that seeks to change sentencing laws for opioid abuse. The legislation seeks to reduce the number of people who are sent back to prison and would allow for shorter sentences for certain drug defendants. It also seeks to further prison reform, which would allow offenders to serve the last part of sentence in home confinement. However, Grassley argues that Senate Majority Leader McConnell will not bring the bill to the floor of Congress because Republicans are fighting against the perception that laws are becoming more lenient on criminals.
On the contrary, it is clear that Congress recognizes the opioid epidemic as a priority in the legislative agenda. In February, Congress passed a 2-year budget plan that allocated $6 billion for opioid and mental health problems. In addition, in April, the Judiciary Committee delayed debate about a prison reform bill but passed Bipartisan opioid proposals in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Legislative initiatives are broad, ranging from increasing research for non-addictive painkillers to improving prescription drug monitoring.
In the 1980s, Congress passed tough sentencing laws for crack cocaine use. 30 years later it is debating how to address another drug crisis, the issue of opioid abuse. However, Congress is changing the way it is framing the drug issue in comparison to its approach to the cocaine epidemic in the past. While it treated the crack cocaine epidemic as an issue of crime, it is planning to approach the opioid issue as a public health issue. Currently, there is no consensus among experts on why it is taking a different approach.
Some argue that there has been a shift in attitudes toward drugs over time. Representative Joe Barton states that people have become more understanding of people who struggle with drug abuse. He stated, “The attitude of the country when crack cocaine became a political issue was different than attitudes toward drugs are today”
Others argue that the difference in the scope of the issue is the main factor for the different approaches between the opioid and crack cocaine epidemic. In 1988, there were 2,252 deaths associated with cocaine whereas in 2016, there were 20,145 overdose deaths from opioid use.
Experts argue that the larger proportion of the population affected by opioid may contribute to the difference in approach proposed by Congress.
Lastly, some argue that the issue of race is the predominant factor. African Americans are disproportionately more affected by the crack cocaine epidemic, while White Americans are disproportionately affected by the Opioid epidemic.
In 2016, white Americans contributed to 80% and blacks 10% of opioid overdose deaths while in 2000, 84% of crack cocaine offenders were black and 6% white.
The racial undertones of the legislative approach to the past crack cocaine epidemic are made clear by the words of John Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s advisor.
He stated, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White house after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
At the time, Congress had passed legislation that had drastically different sentencing guidelines for those who abused crack cocaine, which was cheaper and more commonly used among Black and Hispanic communities, than powder cocaine, which was more commonly used among whites.
As stated in the documentary 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay, drug offenders would be sentenced to “the same amount of time in prison for one ounce of crack cocaine” as for “100 ounces of powder cocaine”.
While some lawmakers seek to improve upon the legislation that had been passed for the crack epidemic, they are frustrated as they say that there are political hurdles that prevent them from doing so.
“We learned from how bad that approach was, so now we’re treating it as a mental-health and a substance-abuse problem—which it is—for opioids. But it was for crack, too, and we still won’t go back and fix it,” Representative Cedric Richmond stated.
Works Cited
DuVernay, Ava, director. 13th. Kandoo Films, 7 Oct. 2016.
Peterson, Kristina, and Stephanie Armour. “Opioid vs. Crack: Congress Reconsiders Its Approach to Drug Epidemic.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 5 May 2018, www.wsj.com/articles/opioid-v-crack-congress-reconsiders-its-approach-to-drug-epidemic-1525518000.