In an ugly coda that was delayed by about a year, the ’94 law also required President Clinton personally to sign off on the infamous 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. The former drug was thought to be the scourge of the planet—and 88 percent of the people arrested for it were black—while the latter, even though it was essentially the same thing, was regarded as just another harmless yuppie crime. Handing down prison sentences of many decades for one drug but not the other was both racist and insanely cruel. But Clinton went out of his way to ensure that this
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