Exploring the Relationship Between Race and the Use of Cocaine

Abstract

In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, legislation that provided harsh new penalties for violations involving crackcocaine. Penalties for powdercocaine offenses, however, were not altered proportionally. This legislation has been denounced on the premise that it unfairly targets minority offenders who are presumed to use crack cocaine more than its powder counterpart. To date, however, only a small body of scholarly research has examined the relationship between race and the preference for crack versus powder cocaine, and no studies have examined this nexus over time. In the present study, a temporal exploration is undertaken with a sample of 6,732 adult Houston arrestees surveyed through the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) Program between 1990 and 1994. Logistic regression identified that the two most powerful predictors of self-reported three-day powdercocaine use were being white and ever having injected drugs illegally. The two most powerful predictors of self-reported three-day crackcocaine use were being black and ever having injected drugs illegally. While being white was a strong predictor of three-day powdercocaine use each year between 1990 and 1994, the association between being black and having recently used crackcocaine diminished considerably over time. Legal implications are assessed in light of the current findings.