Noticing different legislative reactions to meth and crack

The June 5th edition of Congressional Quarterly Weekly (which is not available on-line) includes a terrific cover story by Seth Stern entitled “Meth vs. Crack: Different Legislative Approaches.”  As the title suggests, the article explores the noticeable difference between the legislative reaction to the “crack epidemic” 20 years ago and the “meth epidemic” today.  Here are just a few snippets of a long and very informative article [update: that can now be accessed here]:

When Rep. Elijah E. Cummings visits rural communities in the Midwest that have been ravaged by methamphetamine use, he hears stories of despair and damage not unlike those he heard during the crack epidemic of the 1980s….  The similarities exist despite fundamental differences between the populations affected by the two drugs. Meth is used mostly by white people in rural areas, while the epicenters of the crack epidemic were the African-American communities of the inner cities. “If you were to close your eyes and listen to how they talk about the effect on communities, how it breaks up families and drives down property values, you would swear they were in any urban community” during crack’s heyday, Cummings says.

What’s different this time are the solutions that his congressional colleagues are promoting. The first comprehensive federal anti-meth law, enacted this year, focuses on cutting off the supply of the chemical ingredients used to make the drug — not on toughening punishments for dealers or users.  “There seems to be more of an emphasis on shutting down these meth labs and trying to figure out ways to treat these addicts and then get them back into flow of society,” says Cummings, a Maryland Democrat.  “We don’t get for crack or heroin that kind of support for prevention, treatment and rehabilitation.”…

Lawmakers in both parties consistently characterize meth addicts in more sympathetic terms than they describe crack addicts, and they are showing far less enthusiasm for imprisoning users than at the height of the crack problem two decades ago….  Although lawmakers almost always rebut the notion, their own rhetoric suggests that race is an essential — albeit, perhaps subconscious — reason they are treating the two drug epidemics differently.

Some sociologists and criminologists say the racial component is obvious. “The difference is, meth is a white drug,” says Daniel F. Wilhelm of the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization that seeks to reduce racially disparate prosecutions. “You don’t see any pictures of young black men and women described as the face of meth,” said Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, which advocates for overhauling sentencing law — a reference to the before-and-after mug shots that sheriffs’ offices and lawmakers often display to highlight the physical toll of meth addiction.

[L]istening to the way members of Congress talk about meth users and the images they invoke to portray the problem leaves observers such as Craig Reinarman, a sociology professor at the University of California Santa Cruz convinced that many lawmakers at least talk about drug users differently when they’re “drawn from the good old boy segment of our society, the us rather than the them.”…