In 1986, in response to the crack cocaine epidemic that was crushing American inner cities, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which instituted harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses than for powder cocaine offenses. For sentencing purposes, the law stipulated that one gram of crack cocaine be treated as equivalent to 100 grams of powder cocaine. Because crack cocaine offenders tended to be black and powder cocaine offenders tended to be white, critics of the law denounced it as racially biased in hindsight. But it’s worth remembering that black lawmakers led the initial effort to
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