Word: powders
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...Echols serves his 20 years, reformers of drug sentencing laws are closing in on a goal that was unthinkable even a few years ago: scrapping the federal sentencing structure established in 1986 that gives far harsher penalties for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine, resulting in prisons packed with low-level, predominantly African American offenders. The mechanism is known as the "100-to-1 drug ratio," which gives crack cocaine 100 times the weight of powder cocaine. Under the ratio, a person convicted of selling five grams of crack - about the weight of a teaspoon of salt - triggers the same...
...part of that, Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer told TIME, so much so that the Administration fast-tracked its position on cocaine parity. "The criminal-justice system must be fair, and it must be perceived as being fair," Breuer says. "The 100-to-1 ratio between crack and powder is perhaps the single worst symbol of unfairness in the system. There really is no longer any basis for it." (See pictures of Liberia's fight against the cocaine trade...
...enshrined in the get-tough Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which was intended to bring down drug kingpins and choke off the flow of crack. Research since has shown that many assumptions underlying the laws were flawed, such as the belief that crack is more dangerous than powder cocaine, making its users more violent. And they have had unintended consequences: putting away low-level street dealers rather than the big-time traffickers, with startling racial disparities. (Read "Can Amphetamines Help Cure Cocaine Addiction...
About 77,000 people have been sentenced for crack-related federal crimes since 1992, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which sets federal sentencing guidelines. In 2008, over 80% of offenders sentenced that year were black and 10% were white. Among powder-cocaine offenders, over 52% were Hispanic, about 30% were black and about 16% were white. Crack-cocaine offenders receive longer sentences: 115 months on average in 2008, compared to 91 months for powder-cocaine offenders...
...parties who met in Dushanbe must also deal with the social powder keg that is Central Asia. The recession has badly hit the region, with shrinking job markets in richer nations like Russia and Kazakhstan sending thousands of migrant workers home to poorer ones, such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. What promises to be a very bleak year for many Central Asian households has only amplified questions over the stability of the region as a whole...