Passed less than a month before IRCA, Reagan’s immigration law, it created stiff, mandatory prison terms for anyone convicted of drug possession, establishing a notorious disparity for sentencing in which crack triggered substantially harsher punishments than powder cocaine. This was a ploy to target Black suspects, which law enforcement officers never bothered to conceal. The casual drug user “ought to be taken out and shot,” the head of the Los Angeles Police Department said a few years later, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
