Why is cocaine still illegal?

A mysterious bag of cocaine was found at the White House last week. The saga continues, with commenters clearly salivating for more “Hunter Biden is a dirtbag” content, even though it probably belonged to some 25 year old intern trying to get chicks.

I hate cocaine. My central nervous system needs tamping down, not amping up. Recently, my boss sighed in relief when I told her I’d switched from coffee to tea. So I don’t like it, but why is it against the law?

Our mass incarceration catastrophe (which Joe Biden played an active role in creating, despite his sympathy for his own son’s struggles) has countless origins. But one defining moment was the death of basketball star Len Bias. Bias died after using cocaine. But, it’s unclear if he overdosed or had an underlying heart condition. Regardless of what happened in Bias’s case, fatal overdoses resulting from cocaine are exceedingly rare.

Still, the US social panic apparatus swung into action after Bias’s death. I interviewed activist Eric Sterling, who was a young congressional aide in the 1980s. Here’s how he described it:

IN THE SUMMER of 1986, Eric Sterling, a young Congressional staffer serving on the House Subcommittee on Crime, was told to come up with a plan to toughen up America’s drug laws. “The issue of drugs and crime was really being hyped by the Reagan administration and the news media,” says Sterling. “They were all looking at this, saying, ‘We need to crack down.'”

The “tough-on-crime” frenzy that ensued would transform America. In their rush to do something about drugs, lawmakers reshaped the U.S. criminal justice system, cementing harsh mandatory minimum sentences. But as Sterling remembers it, back in 1986, most lawmakers were uninformed about what they were doing and unaware of the impact it would have on thousands of lives.

When Ronald Reagan signed the The Anti-Drug Abuse Act that October, he promised nothing short of a “drug-free generation.” At the signing, Reagan told the audience of athletes and schoolchildren that addicts would get the support they needed to “live right” and that America’s jails would not fill up with drug users. Yet mandatory minimums trigger an automatic enhanced sentence based on relatively arbitrary amounts of drugs. They rob judges of discretion; while empowering prosecutors to threaten decades-long sentences, even life without parole. In short, America’s jails filled up – and quick. 

“The Anti-Drug Abuse Act was an emotional reaction and not a rational one, so it’s not surprising that its effects have not been what supporters claimed,” says Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “It was done to reduce crime and drug use, but drug use is the same today. In fact, drugs are even cheaper, easier to get. So it’s done nothing in that regard.” In 1994, Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which introduced the three-strikes rule, mandating life without parole for three or more convictions for federal violent felonies or drug trafficking. Many states followed suit, passing three-strikes and habitual offender laws.

Cocaine can’t really kill you, like say, the way alcohol can kill you, in dozens of different ways. It mostly just makes you talk too fast. What can kill you is cocaine laced with fentanyl—an inevitable result of a mostly harmless drug being against the law, thanks to the iron law of prohibition. That’s the idea that when a substance is outlawed, black markets respond by making it as potent as possible in the smallest doses to keep it less detectable to law enforcement. The example I always cite is, there’s a reason that during the Prohibition era, people drank bathtub whisky, not white wine spritzers.

Obviously, a minority of people are susceptible to addiction (hi Hunter). But humans excel at starting wars, being in denial, and getting addicted to literally anything, from horse tranquilizer to food to chewing their own hair. It’s rarely about the substance. We’re all patting ourselves on the back for legalizing weed. That’s like legalizing tea. Until the drugs perceived as more harmful, like cocaine, are on the table for decriminalization, we’ll keep chugging along with our doubled up drug overdose death and mass incarceration crises.