Will pragmatism win the drug war? The Washington Post’s Carrie Johnson reports that both the House and Senate have proposed a bill to close the sentencing disparity between crack and powered cocaine, a policy supported by the Obama administration. The status quo, since 1986, is that you need 100 times the amount of powdered cocaine as crack to get the same mandatory minimum sentence as possession for crack cocaine. Since the predominant users of crack have been black, this has driven up the African American imprisonment rate.

Both proponents of more liberal and stricter drug laws mostly agree that the current disparity is a racially biased policy that only political inertia has prevented from being changed. What’s interesting here is that Congress wants to increase the amount of crack someone needs to possess to get the mandatory minimum sentence, instead of wanting to decrease the amount of cocaine. This is not in the tradition of tough on drugs Washington politics. But it seems Congress is finally willing to consider how expensive it is to imprison people for non-violent drug offenses. Such pragmatic considerations are apparently not the political risk they once were.

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