Word: lsd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Harvard Square has people who will sell you LSD, coke, crack, weed, 'shrooms, speed or ice. But in the Square, the drug of choice...
...seems strange, then, that the DEA's head of LSD operations, Gene Haislip, said at the end of last year about the nation's acid problem, "We've opened up a vein here. We're going to mine it until this whole thing turns around." The problems with this statement run deeper than Haislip's unfortunate drug-addled "vein" analogy. The fact that the DEA has tripled spending and personnel on a drug that doesn't harm anyone physically, doesn't make people harm each other and isn't corrupting national governments in the tropics should make one wonder...
Consider the case of David Chevrette. Chevrette, 20, sold $1,500 worth of LSD to a federal agent. He is now serving a ten year sentence in federal prison with no possibility of parole. He would have been better off, in the eyes of the federal justice system, to have introduced $100,000 of pure smack to America's shores or to have committed an armed robbery. Herein lies the problem...
...LSD sentences on the average 50 times more severe than penalties for other drugs? Part of it is due to a quirk in the federal law which mandates the vessel in which the LSD was stored is included in the weight of "the drug." For instance 100 hits of pure liquid LSD (which is unusable for commercial purposes and unheard of at street level) would get you 10 months, the same amount soaked into blotter paper would warrant 5 years and those doses in sugar cubes would result in 16 years...
Since 50,000 doses of acid weigh less than a penny, it is hard to discern just how much pure LSD is involved. But the government should try a bit harder that this. Weighing the vessel the acid is in and using that as the actual weight of the drug is analogous to busting someone at Customs in Miami for coke possession and then including the weight of the 727 that they flew in on. There is, as we all know, no glut of prison cells in America; the justice system chooses who will fill them with the severity...