This election year is the 30th anniversary of the creation of mandatory minimum sentences for federal drug crimes. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 is an object lesson in how not to write drug legislation. The bill was the congressional response to a new drug on the scene, crack cocaine, a rising crime rate, and the cocaine overdose of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias on June 20, 1986. It was also an election year. Within a week of Bias's death, the House Judiciary Committee had written and passed the legislation without the benefit of hearing from experts, the community, addiction and mental health professionals, drug users, judges, or law enforcement. The bill was approved unanimously, with no floor debate. A mere four months after Bias's death, the 1986 crime bill was signed into law on October 27.
The 1986 drug laws set a pattern that has been hard to break. Congress's historic, knee-jerk reaction to any crime problem over the last 30 years has been to create a mandatory minimum sentence for it, or make existing sentences longer. These longer sentences haven't deterred drug crime or targeted the root of what's driving it. This one-way ratchet effect - sentences can get longer, but never shorter - has dragged all sentences into the stratosphere, helping crowd federal prisons, increase their costs, and lock up plenty of people who are not true threats to public safety. Taxpayers foot this bill. And despite these outcomes, one thing has not changed: Americans still love drugs. Perhaps nothing is a greater indicator of the failure of mandatory minimum drug sentences than the fact that the United States, 30 years after their creation, is now seeing a spike in heroin and opioid abuse.
The response to that spike, however, is notable. Today a bill is in the making that could be a model of how to write drug legislation. The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA, S. 524) is an attempt to address the nation's increased opioid and heroin abuse. Unlike 1986, today lawmakers are getting the facts, and trying to understand the causes of the problem. They have held numerous heroin and opioid abuse hearings both in Washington and in states hit hard by these drugs. They have consulted addiction and treatment specialists, doctors, prescription drug manufacturers, drug users, judges, law enforcement, and drug court experts. Recognizing that addiction is the gasoline on this fire, they have - so far, at least - left harsher prison sentences out of the bill.
While CARA is setting an example of how to handle a drug crisis without increasing penalties, the House and Senate sentencing reform bills can't seem to shake their addiction to punishment. Both bills continue the failed approach of expanding mandatory minimum drug sentences to apply to potentially thousands of people who previously would not have faced them. The House Judiciary Committee advanced the Sentencing Reform Act (H.R. 3713) with a five-year sentencing enhancement for heroin offenses that involve fentanyl. We need only look at the last 30 years to know that this enhancement will be as ineffective at stopping the use and sale of fentanyl as the 1986 laws were at stopping heroin.
These are not steps in the right direction. They are remnants of a 1986 mentality, not 21st-century sentencing reform. Congress knows better and can do better.
Julie Stewart is the president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the nation's leading sentencing reform organization. It is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. This commentary originally appeared in Crime Report.