Since the 1980s, there has been a wide disparity in the sentencing of crack and powder cocaine offenses under federal law: Convictions involving 28 grams of crack cocaine trigger the same mandatory minimum prison sentence as 500 grams of powder cocaine, despite their being two forms of the same drug.

Recognizing that treating crack and powder differently in the law is inexplicable and fundamentally unjust, Congress reduced this disparity in 2010, but there is finally bipartisan appetite for eliminating it.