Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 25, 1994                   TAG: 9404250069
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

HOUSE TO EQUALIZE COCAINE LAW

Crack cocaine was seen as the "black drug," smoked in pipes on inner-city streets and in dilapidated crack "dens." Its users faced hard time if caught.

In 1986, the federal government decided to deal with crack, feared to be far more addictive and dangerous than the powder version. Congress made it 100 times easier to imprison crack users than powdered cocaine users.

Last week the House decided that was wrong. There is no proven difference in the two drugs, both Republicans and Democrats agreed. The only difference was the race of the people who used it.

The House voted 424-0 to ask the U.S. Sentencing Commission to propose a way to equalize the penalties for using the two drugs.

"There is no difference pharmacologically between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. . . . Crack cocaine is no more addictive," said Rep. William Hughes, D-N.J.

"Poor people are the ones that use crack cocaine, mostly minorities," he said, adding that 95 percent of those arrested for crack possession are minorities.

The 1986 crime bill ordered a mandatory, five-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of possessing 5 grams of crack, about the size of two pennies. Possession of 5 grams of powdered cocaine is a misdemeanor that requires only 10 months probation.

For a powdered cocaine user to draw the mandatory five-year prison sentence, he or she would have to be caught with 500 grams, an amount 100 times larger than the crack threshold.

The law, Hughes said, was made "during the fervor of the war on drugs, with a lack of substantive information."