It has been said that there is more mayhem in a gallon of whiskey than a ton of opium. Were illegal substances decriminalized and regulated the local docket Mr. Lott is so worried about would shrink down to real crime dimensions, as the Swiss recently discovered with their heroin program. It is real crime that should concern us, not the kind of crime that's created by the stroke of an opportunistic politician's pen. Crime overall has plummeted to 1970's levels and yet here we have more drum beating, the same self-serving claptrap and the ever expanding American gulag system roaring on regardless. Sanity, it seems, is no longer relevant in the United States.
Risk equals high price equals profit.
So Mr. Lott and the 'Off With Their Heads' gang want to smash the addict flat. Yet this senator wants to raise the ante by equalizing powder cocaine penalties with those in place for crack cocaine violations, regardless that every study to date shows crack cocaine penalties are scientifically illogical, too punitive and tainted with racist application. We suspect this equalization in penalties is to 'prove' that crack laws are somehow just and not racist by the expedient of locking up as many whites for as long for powder, as blacks for crack, since supposedly whites use and traffic in powder more than blacks do. The federally sponsored drug war is currently making orphans of nearly two and a half million children who have one or both parents behind bars. In the civilized world a five-year prison sentence is considered crushing, but in America ten to thirty year sentences are handed out like it's no big deal.