“The world would be completely different. Hundreds of thousands of people would never have gone to jail if Len Bias had not died.”
– Eric Sterling, former Counsel to House Committee who drafted 1986 Substance Abuse Act
Like Len Bias, many athletes will celebrate after Thursday’s NBA Draft and live to play another day. This week marked the 30th anniversary of the death of Len Bias, the great University of Maryland basketball player who died of a cocaine overdose just two days after he was selected with the No. 2 pick in the 1986 NBA draft by the Boston Celtics.
Bias’ use of cocaine sparked a seizure and he collapsed around 6:30 a.m. while talking with Maryland teammate Terry Long. Several attempts by an emergency medical team to restart his heart and breathing were unsuccessful, and Bias was pronounced dead by hospital staff at 8:55 a.m., June 19. Four days later more than 11,000 people packed the Cole Field House, Maryland’s recreation and student center, for a memorial service. At the service, Celtics president Red Auerbach stated that the city of Boston had not been so shocked since the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Over the years, Len Bias, whose talent has been often compared to Michael Jordan’s, has spawned many more hypotheticals on the future of the Boston Celtics than the would-be future of the United States. But his impact on the latter vastly outweighs whatever he may have achieved in Beantown.
Just as Jackie Robinson helped bring an end to old Jim Crow laws of segregation, the death of Len Bias, which sparked the 1986 Ant-Drug Abuse Act, helped usher in “The New Jim Crow” of mass incarceration in America. The 1986 Act’s harsh focus on mandatory minimum sentencing and disparity in crack vs. cocaine penalties led to an explosion of black bodies in prison.
Unlike the lives of Robinson, Muhammad Ali or Billie Jean King, Bias himself was not an outwardly political figure. But his death and blackness were politicized.
The impact of Bias couldn’t have been possible without a plethora of assists from every direction. Here were some of the main players.
HOUSE SPEAKER TIP O’NEILL and The DEMOCRATIC PARTY
In “Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure,” Dan Baum writes:
“Immediately upon returning from the July 4 recess, Tip O’Neill (then the Speaker of the House from Massachusetts) called an emergency meeting… ‘Write me some goddamn legislation,’ he thundered. ‘All anybody up in Boston is talking about is Len Bias. The papers are screaming for blood. We need to get out front on this now. This week. Today. The Republicans beat us to it in 1984 and I don’t want that to happen again. I want dramatic new initiatives for dealing with crack and other drugs.'”
The bi-partisan manipulation of Bias’ death led to the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 in late October. Most notably, the draconian legislation, and additional Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, included devastating mandatory minimum sentences (even for first-time offenders), required the participation of the military in narcotics control efforts, and included the infamous 100-1 Crack vs. Cocaine sentencing disparity where a mere 5 grams of crack would get the same punishment as 500 grams of powdered cocaine.
The new laws became weapons of mass destruction.
In 2007, African Americans accounted for only 18% of crack cocaine users in the U.S., but 83% of those receiving federal sentences for crack cocaine offenses, according to Dave Ungrady, author of “Born Ready: The Mixed Legacy of Len Bias.”
RICHARD NIXON
President Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, called drug abuse “public enemy No. 1 in the United States,” and created the Drug Enforcement Administration two years later.
Earlier this year in a Harper’s article, Baum shared his past interview with former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman who admitted what every Nixon critic already knew – that the War on Drugs was part of a War on Blacks and anti-war protesters. Baum quotes Ehrlichman:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Nixon’s assault on drugs would give the country the police profile it would use to ramp up arrests for the coming decades.
Ironically, it would be a group of anti-war protestors who would discover the criminal depth of this ongoing “war” in 1971 after they successfully broke into an FBI office in Media, Penn. and exposed the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program that targeted African-American leaders from Martin Luther King Jr. to The Black Panthers to the recently passed Muhammad Ali.
RONALD REAGAN
Reagan would implement Nixon’s policies. In The New Jim Crow, Alexander writes:
“In October 1982, President Reagan officially announced his administration’s War on Drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation. This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race.
“Practically overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million. Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased creased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. During that same period, DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 million to $1,026 million, and FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 million to $181 million. By contrast, funding for agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention, and education was dramatically reduced. The budget of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for example, was reduced from $274 million to $57 million from 1981 to 1984, and antidrug funds allocated to the Department of Education were cut from $14 million to $3 million.”
Unlike Nixon’s War on Drugs, Reagan put billions behind it, and by doing so, the prison population soared accordingly.
He also had Len Bias’ death.
JOE BIDEN
“The death of Bias was the thing that put it over the top to pull (The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act) together,” said Scott Green.
“It was a tipping point.”
Green should know.
From 1980 to 1990, Scott Green was a special adviser on crime and drug issues for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a top aide to then-Senator committee chairman Joe Biden.
Amongst Democrats, today’s older quirky “Uncle Joe” comes off as quite the lovable and seemingly progressive figure, but his legacy is rooted in amnesia.
Journalist Radley Balko writes that Biden “has sponsored more damaging drug war legislation than any Democrat in Congress”, and states:
“Hate the way federal prosecutors use RICO laws to take aim at drug offenders? Thank Biden. How about the abomination that is federal asset forfeiture laws? Thank Biden. Think federal prosecutors have too much power in drug cases? Thank Biden. Think the title of a ‘Drug Czar’ is sanctimonious and silly? Thank Biden, who helped create the position. Tired of the ridiculous steroids hearings in Congress? Thank Biden… Oh, and he was also the chief sponsor of 2004’s horrendous RAVE Act.”
By 2005, Biden would begin to reverse course on his efforts he led in 1986, and by 2010, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which eliminated a mandatory minimum for simple possession of crack, and reduced the mandatory-minimum-sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1.
While the 18-1 adjustment was still highly unfair, it could have happened 15 years earlier.
BILL CLINTON
In April, protesters interrupted Bill Clinton’s speech in Philadelphia, which sparked the former president’s ire, and a long-overdue mainstream discussion on the terrible impact of his 1994 Crime Bill. Because of a 10-year window of hindsight, Clinton’s lesser-known 1995 decision is even worse.
By 1995, a detailed 200-page U.S. Sentencing Commission Report suggested eliminating the 100-1 crack vs. cocaine sentencing disparity. The Congressional Black Caucus called on Clinton to veto the 1995 bill that extended the law and in a letter stated: “These disparities make a mockery of justice” and Rev. Jesse Jackson said “President Clinton must veto a bill that is obviously racist.”
How obviously racist?
By 1995, more whites were using crack, but in the previous four years 96% of those prosecuted in federal court for crack cocaine crimes were blacks or Latinos.
A 1992 commission survey found that there was not a single white person convicted in federal court for crack cocaine in 16 states – including major cities like Chicago, Miami and Denver.
By 1995, saying “I didn’t know” about the devastating impact of the 1980’s legislation was simply impossible. Through reports, data, and pleas, Clinton was made well-aware, but still chose not to end the disparity. It would continue for another 15 years.
THE MEDIA
Like the rise of Donald Trump today, Reagan’s War was aided and abetted by a media willing to profit off the same racial imagery that would sell Reagan’s drug war. Media depictions of white cocaine users in the early 1980’s were replaced with people of color by 1985.
In her book “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander writes of the media environment leading up to the death of Len Bias and football player Don Rogers, a safety for the Cleveland Browns, who also died of a cocaine overdose just eight days later:
“In June 1986, Newsweek declared crack to be the biggest story since Vietnam/Watergate, and in August of that year, Time magazine termed crack ‘the issue of the year.’ Thousands of stories about the crack crisis flooded the airwaves and newsstands, and the stories had a clear racial subtext. The articles typically featured black ‘crack whores,’ ‘crack babies,’ and ‘gangbangers,’ reinforcing already prevalent racial stereotypes of black women as irresponsible, selfish ‘welfare queens,’ and black men as ‘predators’ – part of an inferior and criminal subculture.
Speaking of Bias and Rogers, “the media erroneously reported their deaths as caused by crack”.
Despite no evidence Bias ever used crack, his blackness fit the crack narrative.
In the decades since Bias, white drug use and tragedy is widely ignored, including by sports media.
SPORTS MEDIA & WHITE ADDICTS
From 2004-2007, the allegedly cocaine-related self-destructive deaths of baseball players Ken Caminiti, Steve Howe, Rod Beck, and Josh Hancock barely created a media ripple.
The admitted crystal meth addiction by tennis star Andre Agassi, or meth allegations against NASCAR’s Jeremy Mayfield or former Olympian Nicole Bobeck all failed to produce media outrage and punitive responses against a dangerous emerging drug that even ensnared televangelist Ted Haggard.
Allegations of crack use by white athletes are either ignored as with tennis star Jennifer Capriati, or presented in redemptive terms like baseball star Josh Hamilton.
Hamilton, who once pawned off his own wedding ring, and was caught by his wife unscrewing his television for its sale as well, has said “crack ruled my life” and that in 2005:
“I was no longer a baseball player; I was a crack addict, a junkie.”
As is the norm for white crack users, Hamilton would avoid the very jail time that would make his incredible baseball comeback possible.
Hamilton’s redemption cannot be separated from his whiteness.
According to many drug experts, neither is the kindler, gentler response to America’s recent heroin epidemic over the last decade. Between 2006 and 2013, federal records reveal that the number of first-time heroin users nearly doubled, and the rate of deadly heroin overdoses nearly quadrupled between 2002 and 2013, according to The Center for Disease Control and Prevention. However, in the Atlantic’s “How White Users Made Heroin a Public Health Problem,” Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project says:
“The response to the rise in heroin use follows patterns we’ve seen over decades of drug scares. When the perception of the user population is primarily people of color, then the response is to demonize and punish. When it’s white, then we search for answers.”
LEN BIAS TODAY
This year, $571 million has already been sanctioned for treatment and prevention, President Obama is seeking another 1.1 billion, and has even enlisted rapper Macklemore in his education efforts. This is a good thing and the type of bi-partisan response when drug use rises in white communities.
But since Len Bias died, the federal and state prison population has exploded.
Eric Sterling, who helped draft the original 1986 law, found that for crack-cocaine there are 10 black federal defendants for every one white federal defendant. Not only that, but the overwhelming majority of powder cocaine defendants are still black or Hispanic.
Sterling calculated near the turn of the 21st century that on a years-in-prison-per-gram-of-cocaine basis, a low-level crack offender is punished 300 times worse than a high-level powder cocaine trafficker.
Not twice as worse – 300 times.
“Oops,” “I’m sorry,” or “my bad” just won’t do.
Says Alexander, “we haven’t woken up to the magnitude of the harm that we have done,” and explains the costs:
“Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big — big money, big businesses selling weed — after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?
“After waging a brutal war on poor communities of color, a drug war that has decimated families, spread despair and hopelessness through entire communities, and a war that has fanned the flames of the very violence it was supposedly intended to address and control; after pouring billions of dollars into prisons and allowing schools to fail; we’re gonna simply say, we’re done now?”
The instinctual response is to want to send every politician to jail for their criminality at worst, or criminal negligence at best. Instead, Alexander has called for Drug War reparations.
“I think we have to be willing, as we’re talking about legalization, to also start talking about reparations for the war on drugs, how to repair the harm caused.”
Of the original 1986 drug law architects, Eric Sterling is one of the very few that has continually worked to repair that harm since the 1990’s.
When Sterling says “hundreds of thousands of people would never have gone to jail if Len Bias had not died,” it makes me want to enter a time machine to 1986 and keep Lenny alive that night.
But there is no way to do that.
Beyond new legislation, billions of dollars to all the lives, families and communities destroyed is the only place to start.
