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NEW YORK, May 4 (OneWorld.net) - The U.S. Congress is coming under heavy pressure to change a drug law that many civil and human rights groups have been denouncing for years as a tool of discrimination against African Americans.

Crack cocaine. © Hugh Bell (Flickr)"It is now time for Congress to act by eliminating this unjust and ineffective sentencing disparity," said Jennifer Bellamy, a lawyer who works with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), one of the nation's oldest rights advocacy organizations.

Last week, a broad coalition of over 50 organizations, including the ACLU, sent a joint petition to Congress calling for elimination of what they described as a "discriminatory sentencing disparity" between white and non-white users of cocaine.

The existing federal anti-drug law requires a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for a first-time simple possession of five grams -- the weight of two sugar packets -- of crack cocaine. The same sentence applies for a person in possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine.

Bellamy describes this 100-to-1 disparity as "based upon incorrect presumptions about the nature of the drugs." She thinks it has a racially discriminatory impact "because the majority of people arrested for powder offenses are white, while the majority of crack arrestees are black."

"The crack arrestees are far more likely to be black, despite the fact that the majority of crack users are white," she said in a statement endorsed by a number of law professors as well as dozens of leading civil and human rights organizations.

The statement was signed by representatives from groups as diverse as the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Association of Social Workers, the National Bar Association, the Latino-rights group National Council of La Raza, and the United Methodist Church.

Last Thursday, in a hearing held on Capitol Hill, judges, prosecutors, and a former drug czar told lawmakers that treating crack and powder cocaine the same way is not being soft on crime, but is smarter and fairer drug policy.

The ACLU and its allied groups welcomed those statements.

"[The] hearing unmistakably demonstrates that there is broad-based support for ending the crack cocaine disparity. Groups representing civil liberties and civil rights advocates as well as leaders of the religious and legal community took a stand against the racial discrimination," said Bellamy.

The groups called for congressional action to eliminate the sentencing disparity this year.

It has been more than two decades since the anti-drug abuse law that differentiates between the two kinds of cocaine -- powder and crack -- was enacted. The powder form of cocaine is more expensive than the crack form, and thus the latter is widely used by blacks and other low-income, racial minorities.

Nationwide, statistics compiled by the U.S. Sentencing Commission reveal that African-Americans are more likely to be convicted of crack cocaine offenses, while whites and Hispanics are more likely to be convicted of powder cocaine offenses.

Independent researchers say many of the assumptions used in determining the 100-to-1 ratio are simply wrong, because in terms of pharmacological effects, crack cocaine is no more harmful than powder cocaine.

Critics of the current legislation hold that mandatory penalties for crack cocaine offenses apply most often to offenders who sell cocaine on the streets instead of those who run the drug cartels and make profits in the billions of dollars every year.

In 1993, the ACLU convened the first national symposium demanding an end to the crack-powder sentencing disparity. Later, in 2002 and again in 2007, the group called for the federal government to equalize crack and powder cocaine sentences.

Official statistics in 2005 revealed that more than 60 percent of all federal cases of crack cocaine were brought against the lowest level participants, while only about 8 percent of cases were registered against the highest-level participants.

According to the ACLU, in 2006, crack cocaine offenders were prosecuted for an average quantity of 51 grams, which is equivalent to the weight of an average candy bar.

Critics of the existing anti-drug laws say for decades people convicted of low-level crack offenses, many with no previous criminal record, have been punished far more severely than those who are wholesale traffickers of the drug in powder form.

"These results," according to ACLU, "do not reflect Congress' intent to stem the traffic in cocaine and these prosecutorial practices have been unsuccessful in ending drug abuse."

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