ASSOCIATED PRESS
They were indelible images of the cocaine world of the 1970s and ’80s: Rich yuppies and white suburbanites partying down with a couple of lines of blow — Charlie Sheen snorting up in the limo in Wall Street; Woody Allen’s sneeze in Annie Hall.
Decades later, the image remains but the reality of coke in the United States has shifted significantly. Long portrayed as a Caucasian crime, Hispanics now make up the overwhelming majority — 60 percent — of federal offenders facing powder cocaine charges.
While no recent studies are available about who uses powder cocaine most, government data show more Hispanics than whites or blacks have been sentenced on federal powder charges since 1992.
Law-enforcement officials say that’s because federal agents almost exclusively pursue cocaine traffickers from South America and Mexico, rather than of end-of-the-line U.S. consumers.
Until the last decade, when the price of cocaine dropped sharply, consumers were largely affluent and educated. That fed into the misperception — often reported by the Associated Press and other news organizations — that most powder cocaine offenders were white, experts say.
There was a lot of publicity about the white population using it; it was more of a higher economic status thing, said Dorothy K. Hatsukami, a behavioral scientist at the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Cancer Center. She co-authored a 1996 study medically challenging federal sentencing guidelines that penalized black cocaine offenders more harshly than white ones.
The study cited 1993 data indicating that 69 percent of powder and crack cocaine users were white, compared with 15 percent black and 13 percent Hispanic. However, it suggested that far more blacks and Hispanics used the cheaper crack cocaine than whites.
Articles in the papers were all related to the jet-setters into powder cocaine, Ms. Hatsukami said in an interview this week. There was a lot of media focus on whites and powder in the 1980s … that’s what people did at parties, and people didn’t think it was all that harmful.
The issue of race in cocaine use surfaced again recently with last winter’s U.S. Sentencing Commission vote to ease penalties for crack cocaine offenders — more than 80 percent of whom have been black, according to data between 1992 and 2006.
By contrast, the number of Hispanic offenders for powder has risen steadily over the years, from 40 percent in 1992 to 58 percent in 2006, Sentencing Commission data show. At the same time, the number of white offenders has steadily dropped: from 32 percent in 1992 to 14 percent two years ago.
Federal drug agents and prosecutors are quick to defend their focus on leaders of major drug rings and international traffickers — mostly blacks and Hispanics — instead of small-time or individual cocaine users who are generally charged with state and local crimes.
By 2000, half of all cocaine traffickers facing federal charges were Hispanic, U.S. Sentencing Commission data show. Hispanics also made up 61 percent of traffickers smuggling in more than 5 kilograms (about 11 pounds).
I’m not going to tell you it’s not worthwhile to put the user in jail, said Drug Enforcement Administration agent Michael Sanders. But we are mandated to dismantle and disrupt major cartels. That’s our ultimate goal.
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