Why not make this a 'health' issue. In a free society shouldn't someone be free to use drugs of their choice? Instead of spending money on incarceration (possession), why not legalize the drug, tax, use the funds for prevention and other health related issues (as with tobacco)?

  More precisely it takes 1/100th the amount of "crack" to result in the same offense level range that would apply for a "powder" cocaine offense, so the sentences are not 100 times more severe, but the difference is often very large and thee is no rational reason for it (although courts have refused to declare the disparity unconstitutional under equal protection analysi even on the rationa basis test applicable when a protected class is not involved).

Sure it does. If you are a rich white kid, you don't smoke crack. You snort the good stuff. These laws protect such individuals, while busting poor kids to make it look as though the war on drugs is succeeding. It's all propaganda.

 Why not make this a 'health' issue. In a free society shouldn't someone be free to use drugs of their choice? Instead of spending money on incarceration (possession), why not legalize the drug, tax, use the funds for prevention and other health related issues (as with tobacco)?

  There is no question that the "crack" penalties were adopted in an environment where race was an issue. However whether one is black, white. latino, asian or whatever,  but the penalties for TRAFFICKING in crack are way out of proportion to the sentences for TRAFFICKING in powder.

  The last really significant amendmeent of the drug guidelines was the increase in the penalties for manufacturing or trafficking in methampheatmine. Many (myself included) believe that this was done largely  as a "be careful for what you ask" response to the pressure being imposed by those who pointed out how the "crack" guidelines disparately impacted black drug traffickers. Confronted with indisputable evidence that blacks were proportionally bearing a greater burden of the affect of the crack guidelines, a drug made and sold far more by whites than blacks was selected for increased penalties.

  This time, we need a) across the booard attention to sentences for all drug-trafficking offenses and b) action -- and it could be legislative or judicial-- that ensures that district court judges have the disctretion to tailor sentences that are appropriate to the offense and THE OFFENDER. I'm opposed to the whole idea of guideline sentencing which imposes a regime where the humanity (good or bad) of the defendant is far too small a part, if any, of the equation.

selling 5,000 grams of powder cocaine (about a briefcase full) gets a mandatory 10-year prison sentence, but so does selling only 50 grams of crack cocaine.

If, say, 50g of powder got you only 36.5 days and an equivalent amount of crack got you 36.5 x 100 = 3650 days (10 years) then this statement would be correct:

the penalties for crack cocaine offenses [are] 100 times more severe than those for powder cocaine.

Although I can certainly understand the desire to boil the argument down into one easily understood and striking sentence to get your point across.

I have no dog in this fight, if there is no good reason for the sentencing disparity, I say it should be fixed.

So, is there any good reason for the disparity? What was there a reason for the enactment of the law(s) back in '86?

  When Len Bias died "crack" became a media sensation and there was all sorts of since disproven claims that "crack" was far more dangerous than powder cocaine. In reality the only difference is that powder is a salt (HCL) that has a higher melting point than the base and is not smokable. Claims that smoking made it more addictive than powder have been disprove. the argument that because smoked crack enters the bloodstram faster it has more dangerous acute effects ignores the fact that the most dangerous method of ingestion is intravenous injection and that is done with powder.

   Moreover, crack is cheaper because it generally contains less actual cocaine than powder.  

   Another huge  complaint though is that the disparity stands logic on its head. Almost if not all smugglers and high-level drug dealers deal exclusively in powder. Powder is converted to crack near the bottom of distribution chains. which means that the objectively greater offenders are not penalized by the disaparity but those at street-level or a step up are.

  One would think that the law would recognize that a kid holding less than 2 ounces on the street corner is not at the same level of culpability of a guy  caught with  one gram less than 5 kilos of powder but instead the law gives the kid a 10 year mandatory minimum (that is actually a statutory not guideline issue but the guidlines correspond) but the guy with the nearly 5 kilos might get as little as 5.

  The way it works is that each year the Sentencing Commission can propose amendments to the guidelines and those amendments become effective November 1 of each year unless Congress votes against them (in other words it's something of an accountability avoidance mechanism-- changes can be implemented merely by Congress doing nothing and no votes on the record being needed) but on that issue Congress voted to kill the amendment.

  After that we actually had a period where the Sentencing Commission was silenced to an extent by the failure to fill vacancies.

  It's really interesting now after Booker, booker has nothing to do with the 100:1 ratio directly, but it has highlighted the operation of the guidelines. Prior to the election a lot of people were hypthesizing that if the Courts took Booker  and ran with it by imposing a significant number of variance sentences below the guideline range that Congress might set even more statutory strictures mandating harsh penalties for drug offenses.