The Washington Post looks toward the end of the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity with some ambivalence. It appears that they failed to consider whether prison sentences are an effective tool for addressing the harm associated with crack use.

IN THE 1980s, entire communities were devastated by the addiction and violence that accompanied crack, a smokable form of cocaine. Congress reacted by passing extraordinarily tough laws, including one that mandated a minimum prison sentence of five years for those in possession of as little as five grams of crack. Those arrested with 50 grams were automatically slapped with a 10-year sentence.

This supposed solution,…

• Cocaine Vaccine for the Treatment of Cocaine Dependence in Methadone-Maintained Patients
• Cocaine use doubles in Mexico in six years
• The genetics of addiction

It’s important to remember how wrong we can be. America has a long history of drug hype that leads to bad policy.

When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.”

But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging stories of…

Vacation has been a little tricky so far. I’m away from my partner, my routine, my gym, my therapist, and my friends who know what’s going on with me. I’m essentially a single parent and my kid’s been clinging to me like a velcro monkey since Thursday, and since my family doesn’t even know I ever had a problem with opiates, let alone that I’m in treatment for my addiction. Sketchy? Why yes it is!

I don’t even like to admit that I have these thoughts, which probably means that I should fess up. Before I even got on the plane,…

I’ve mentioned before on my site that there was a time in my life where I was the drug user in my relationship. When we first met, my husband was clean. I wasn’t.

I am not sure, however, that I’ve explained the extent of my drug use. I was talking to MPJ last night about it, and wondering if I might not be (drumroll) a dry drug addict. If someone else told me my story, told me she’d gotten clean by moving away from the place where she was using, told me she was sure she’d never use again even though she never…