Consider the case of David Chevrette. Chevrette, 20, sold $1,500 worth of LSD to a federal agent. He is now serving a ten year sentence in federal prison with no possibility of parole. He would have been better off, in the eyes of the federal justice system, to have introduced $100,000 of pure smack to America's shores or to have committed an armed robbery. Herein lies the problem.
When we wonder why other countries have a hard time taking us seriously as a nation, we need to look no further than the DEA's Sentencing Guidelines.
Why are LSD sentences on the average 50 times more severe than penalties for other drugs? Part of it is due to a quirk in the federal law which mandates the vessel in which the LSD was stored is included in the weight of "the drug." For instance 100 hits of pure liquid LSD (which is unusable for commercial purposes and unheard of at street level) would get you 10 months, the same amount soaked into blotter paper would warrant 5 years and those doses in sugar cubes would result in 16 years.
Since 50,000 doses of acid weigh less than a penny, it is hard to discern just how much pure LSD is involved. But the government should try a bit harder that this. Weighing the vessel the acid is in and using that as the actual weight of the drug is analogous to busting someone at Customs in Miami for coke possession and then including the weight of the 727 that they flew in on. There is, as we all know, no glut of prison cells in America; the justice system chooses who will fill them with the severity of sentences that it hands down. Having non-violent kids whose drugs weren't worth enough to buy a good stereo having to watch three Olympiads from prison while attempted murderers get half the time is not the way to run a country.
When the War on Drugs clogs the jails to the point that the Tussle with Murder and the Spat with Rape are compromised, we have to wonder where we are headed as a land.
And the reasons for such an inconsistency are clear, such as the nasty habit of Peruvian drug police to end up in vats of hydrochloric acid in the Upper Huallaga Valley and the tendency of entire Latin American governments to be completely and totally corrupted by drug lords.
The DEA is tripling the waste of money, human capital and jail space dedicated to a drug that has no well-documented adverse side effects, a drug with which violence is almost never associated, and a drug which consistently finishes last in market share.
The DEA is also not completely to blame here. Having cut their teeth (and having had every other appendage forcibly removed) during the South American Conflict with Coke, many agents learned that anyone who stands between the world's richest nation and its favorite supply of drugs is going to end up with facial features a la Picasso at best and dismembered at worst.
So they downsized expectations, reevaluated goals, and did the bureaucratic equivalent of the Patriots opting out of the NFL in favor of the Pop Warner Conference. The trouble is by doing that they are compromising our ability to punish those who are truly dangerous.