The 82 Percent Solution.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Crack sentencing reform

CONGRESS passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 in the middle of an election season, just a few months after the death of basketball star Len Bias from an apparent cocaine overdose. The law created extraordinarily harsh penalties for offenses involving crack cocaine, the form of the drug that many legislators erroneously thought Bias had used. Only 16 members of the House and two members of the Senate voted against it.

Last summer Congress finally revised the draconian crack sentences it had created nearly a quarter of a century before. The U.S. Sentencing Commission estimates that the changes, which do not apply retroactively, will benefit about 3,000 offenders a year, reducing sentences by an average of 27 months. The reform bill, signed by President Barack Obama on August 3, received unanimous approval from the Senate in March and passed by a voice vote in the House at the end of July.

The dramatic reversal reflected a new consensus that the legal distinction between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine, which had a disproportionate impact on black defendants, was based on irrational fears. Under the 1986 law, five grams of crack cocaine triggered the...