Fitting the crime: Focus more on rapists than crack residue

The Houston Chronicle, a pop­u­lar source for infor­ma­tion about the infa­mous Houston PD crime lab, just ran an op-ed piece on changes in pol­icy at the Harris County Prosecutor’s Office.

What can you do with one mol­e­cule of crack? Nothing, really. It won’t get you high, and you can’t sell it. Heck: You can’t even see it. But up until now, if a police crime lab detected any amount of the drug in your pos­ses­sion — even that stray mol­e­cule — it’s been enough for Harris County pros­e­cu­tors to charge you with a felony that could send you to state jail.

So here’s to District Attorney Pat Lykos for real­iz­ing how crazy that is. Starting Jan. 1, county pros­e­cu­tors are instructed not to file felony charges for drug amounts under a hun­dredth of a gram.

How much is that? Barely a speck: A McDonald’s sugar packet con­tains 400 times more pow­der. But a hun­dredth of a gram is the absolute min­i­mum nec­es­sary to con­duct two lab tests: one for the pros­e­cu­tion, one for the defense. In other words, it’s the absolute min­i­mum nec­es­sary for a fair trial.

Harris County is wel­come to make any poli­cies they like, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to inter­ject a lit­tle truth into the appar­ently “pro-drug” editor’s comments.

1) 10mg of crack cocaine is no where near a “mol­e­cule”. It’s actu­ally around 2 x 10^19 mol­e­cules of crack cocaine. So enough with the hyper­bole. Heck labs can’t even detect one mol­e­cule of cocaine.

2) 100mg of crack cocaine is about the size of an aver­age “crack rock” sold. Well it was in the Phoenix Arizona area circa 2000 when I ana­lyzed hun­dreds of them per month. Then it was roughly $20 worth of crack cocaine. The 10mg they are talk­ing about in this arti­cle is indeed a rather small amount, but it’s vis­i­ble, and easy enough to manip­u­late for both test­ing and ingestion.

One of the require­ments for pros­e­cu­tion in Arizona is if the drug was “usable”. Many crime labs here have arti­fi­cially applied min­i­mum amount of drugs that have to be present in order for it to be “usable”. This cre­ates an inter­est­ing prob­lem. What is “usable” (and there­for a crime) on one side of the street (Phoenix for exam­ple) isn’t on the other side of the street (Scottsdale for exam­ple). If the drug wasn’t “usable” the per­son car­ry­ing it prob­a­bly wouldn’t keep it.

Depending on what your state laws are, it really isn’t how much of the drug is present, just it’s pres­ence. And it cer­tainly isn’t tied to whether or not there is enough there for some­one to “get high” off of.

Certainly crime labs and pros­e­cu­tors offices can shift resources how­ever they feel the local com­mu­nity would best be served. Just don’t use mis­in­for­ma­tion to try and prove your point.

Read the entire Houston Chronicle arti­cle here.