This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 28th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The disparity in sentencing for

the equivalent volumes of crack versus powdered cocaine is angered criminal justice reformers for decades. Now even those who voted for the measures including Joe

Biden and Dick Durbin are ready to end that disparity.

Kevin Ring runs families against mandatory minimums.

We discussed how we got here and what ought to come next.

Where did we get this disparity between sentencing related to crack cocaine and

powdered cocaine, which we should be very clear you can make a lot of crack cocaine with a

relatively small amount of powdered cocaine and and this is it it never made sense on its face if you think about it for just a few minutes but where did it where did it come from?

It came from the moral panic in the 1980s because violent crime was high in this country.

If people don't remember it really was a time where you wouldn't have gone in New York City.

Violent crime was much higher than it is even today with the crime spike we're

having and a lot of people associated that with this new drug crack cocaine and

thinking that the violence was associated with the crack, that it was a quick high,

there was all this concern that there was these crack babies, you were seeing stories that women were having babies who were addicted to crack.

The people were acting in all sorts of different ways.

It was the new drug.

And so there was a complete moral panic about it.

And then what happened was Len Bias, who was a superstar basketball player at the University of Maryland,

drafted by the Boston Celtics, dies of an overdose.

Now classic, you know, fun thing in history is people think it's from crack. It was powder, but they didn't know that.

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