Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 28, 1994 TAG: 9403280070
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: New York Daily News
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
As editor of Relix, a magazine dedicated largely to the Grateful Dead, she was receiving loads of mail from fans - Deadheads. Many were written from prison.
What Brown was seeing back in 1991 were the first results of an ongoing undercover operation by the Drug Enforcement Agency, as well as local and state police, to target the buying and selling of LSD at Grateful Dead concerts.
Independent surveys estimate that up to 2,000 Deadheads, most of them first-time offenders, have been nabbed at or around concerts through stings.
Because of mandatory drug sentences, many of these new prisoners are serving longer sentences than rapists, kidnappers, armed robbers and big-time heroin dealers.
Anyone apprehended with more than 1 gram of LSD must serve a five-year sentence, and it's 10 years for anything more than 10 grams. Although a single gram of pure LSD yields 20,000 doses, authorities rarely encounter that much.
Instead, when computing a sentence, prosecutors include the weight of the much heavier sugar cube or paper that carries the LSD.
DEA records show that average sentences for people carrying $1,500 worth of LSD is 10.1 years, compared with 6.5 years for attempted murder, 5.8 years for rape and 4.2 years for kidnapping. Heroin dealers have to smuggle more than $100,000 of the drug before receiving a similar sentence.
"No one has ever robbed anyone else so they could go buy a hit of acid - it just doesn't work that way," said Dennis McNally, the Grateful Dead's publicist. "The bottom line is that it is much easier [for the DEA] to go after a bunch of nonviolent, young, true believers who think they are giving you a ticket to enlightenment when they sell you a hit of acid, than to go after a bunch of armed crack dealers."
by CNB