Drugs are drugs and cocaine is cocaine. Crack is no more or less of a problem than powdered cocaine in terms of the human brain or the human body. The most addictive and dangerous way to ingest cocaine, intravenously, is not “more illegal” than just snorting it.

Crack is all about packaging. By taking a rather perishable powdered products and making it into an insoluable rock, it became easy to market to those without a home. Crack was all about taking a dangerous drug that you couldn’t get to the poor before, into the hands of those who already had little to loose.

Just wait until Meth hits the heart of urban America! Look at smaller midwestern cities like Des Moines, St. Louis, Terre Haute, etc. Imagine that in Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami, or Gary.

Cocaine is bad news but tougher sentences just don’t make sense relative to powdered cocaine. As it stands now, enough Crack to get a room full of knuckleheads wasted for an evening will get a person more time in prison that the an amount of heroin that could send a whole neighborhood into the gutter for a week.

This stuff has to be proportional to work. Same for white collar crime. Nobody gets hurt so what the heck, small sentence. Ask the people whe were ruined by Enron or the S&L scandal of times past. Somebody with a fistful of Crack can pretty much hurt only themselves and maybe a couple of others. Hundreds of thousands of people were ruined by these white collar crimes and sentences were light for just about everybody.

I guess he thinks crack pushers, gang members, and rapists will consider voting for his re-election. I can’t wait to sit next to a member of this new constituency at the next Republican grassroots meeting.

At the federal level, Democrats in the Senate and House, including Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barbara Boxer of California, introduced legislation this week that addresses the issue. Among a host of other proposals for ensuring that “every vote is counted,” the legislation seeks to restore voting rights “for felons who have repaid their debt to society” and would require states to end the practice of denying voting rights to felons who have completed their prison terms, parole or probation, the sponsors said.

It’s despicable the way our leaders in Washington don’t hesitate to sell us out for personal gain. Then they turn on that smarmy holier-than-thou rhetoric, as if we’re the bastards for standing in the way of progress. My heart breaks for those rapists and murderers who society continues to look on with concern. Yeah, it’s all our fault, as usual.