It "seemed like a good idea at the time," former Rep. Charles Rangel (D–N.Y.) says in the Netflix documentary Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy. Rangel, who represented Harlem from 1971 to 2017, is talking about the draconian political response to the crack cocaine "epidemic" of the 1980s.
That response included a federal sentencing scheme, backed by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D–Del.), that treated crack as if it were 100 times worse than cocaine powder and imposed a five-year mandatory minimum for possessing as little as five grams. Crack reminds us of the circumstances in which policies like those, which overwhelmingly targeted African Americans, seemed like a good idea to supposedly liberal black Democrats such as Rangel. "Clearly," he says now, "it was overkill."
