Rockefeller’s Drug Insanity.

Bob Herbert takes aim at the Rockefeller drug laws, now almost thirty years old. The ethnic differentials in the enforcement of the drug laws are extraordinary. While there is wide use of illegal drugs across the ethnic spectrum, including among whites, 94 percent of the people doing time for drug offenses in the state of New York are black or Hispanic. Indeed, according to one of the laws’ original sponsors, “New York now sends more African-American and Latino men to prison each year than it graduates from its state colleges and universities.”