5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music, and the War on Drugs

2. The Invisible Hand Holds a Gun: Law and Policy in the Lethal Regulation of Crack

 l l 2 The Invisible Hand Holds a Gun Law and Policy in the Lethal Regulation of Crack It’s only crack sales making niggas act like that. —Prodigy in Mobb Deep, “Q.U.—Hectic,” The Infamous, 1995 In addition to repealing the mandatory minimum for the simple possession of crack cocaine, the bill signed into law by President Obama in August 2010 also reduced the sentencing disparity between crack trafficking and powder trafficking from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1. By any measure, such a reduction constitutes a significant improvement, requiring five hundred grams of powder or twenty-eight grams of crack to trigger a fiveyear mandatory sentence instead of the 500-to-5-gram ratio created in 1986. The final bill, however, was only one in a long line of similar bills proposed over the years. In 2007, for example, Democratic representative Sheila Jackson introduced a bill, H.R. 265, that proposed to equalize the 100-to-1 ratio at the powder level by making possession with intent to distribute five hundred grams of either powder or crack punishable by a mandatory five-year sentence . In 2009, the same bill was again introduced by Jackson, as were similar bills by Democratic representatives Charles Rangel (H.R. 2178) and Robert Scott (H.R. 3245). Also in 2009, Republican representative Roscoe Bartlett proposed a bill, H.R. 18, that would have equalized the 100-to-1 disparity from the opposite direction: by making possession with  x The Invisible Hand Holds a Gun intent to distribute five grams of either powder or crack punishable by a mandatory five-year term. What’s so striking about these proposals is the casinolike way in which the various drug quantities are arrived at, with government officials coming up with numbers seemingly out of thin air. Some aimed to create a 1-to-1 ratio by increasing crack amounts to powder levels, while others intended to create the same ratio by decreasing powder levels to crack amounts. Given such extremes, the final 18-to-1 ratio would appear to be a compromise. And, while any reduction in the crack-powder disparity should be seen as a victory for advocates of rational drug policy, the new ratio, even though a clear improvement, seems especially random since it is based—like the 100-to-1 disparity it has replaced—on no scientific evidence. Why 18-to-1? Why twenty-eight grams? Why not thirty-seven, or fourteen, or six? As a consequence, the thoroughly illogical premises on which the 100-to-1 ratio had been based will remain. Eighteen-to-one is no more logical than 100-to-1, and that very illogicality has had profound consequences for real people in real communities whose lives have been unalterably affected by it. Unfortunately, the casinolike quality of these congressional debates makes light of the lethality that has so indelibly marked the crack era. Such haphazard reductions—the seemingly random fluctuations of drug quantities—will never, by themselves, be able to address the significant symbolic power that has grown from the social disruption incurred as a result of our illogical policies . Where chapter 1 provided an overview of the punitive contexts out of which crack’s experiential fabric was born, this chapter traces the ruthless illogicality at the heart of the U.S. government’s punishment structure for crack cocaine. I rely primarily on the Sentencing Commission’s four reports to Congress that have consistently challenged the mandatory minimums in order to let crack’s paradoxical punishment “speak for itself.”1 It is from the lethal wake of this illogicality that crack’s symbolic role in rap’s confrontation with its own commercialization develops. Speed of Passing The paradoxical punishment of crack cocaine begins with the speed of the law’s passing in 1986, which deviated from the normal committee process, suggesting the degree to which crack’s punishment was out of the ordinary from the start. As Senator Chiles, for example, remarked, “[I]t is historical for the Congress to be able to move this quickly.”2 Simi- The Invisible Hand Holds a Gun x  larly, commenting on criticisms made at the time, Senator Rockefeller described the bill’s process as “moving too fast and frenetically.”3 Other senators were quite clearly critical, arguing that “none of us has had an adequate opportunity to study this enormous package. It did not emerge from the crucible...