Scores of San Diego State University students are rounded up in a sweeping drug bust. 

During finals week of the spring semester, 95 San Diego State University students— and 30 others—were arrested on assorted drug-related charges in a series of raids conducted by federal and local lawenforcement agencies. The roundup culminated a year-long undercover sting operation targeting dealers and buyers at SDSU, particularly members of several fraternities.

At the residences of students and non- SDSU-affiliated individuals, investigators confiscated up to $100,000 worth of cocaine, marijuana, Ecstasy, psylocibin mushrooms, illicit prescription drugs and other substances. They also seized $60,000 in cash and various weapons, including a shotgun and three semiautomatic pistols.

According to the District Attorney’s Office of San Diego County, 54 SDSU students were arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration agents, who suspected a direct connection to the originally targeted traffickers. The remaining 41 were arrested by campus police officers for minor offenses uncovered between January and May 2008. Officials said these suspects were not necessarily connected to the drug ring, but were arrested in accordance with the university’s zero-tolerance drug policy.

The D.A.’s office also noted that one student apprehended in the raids—Omar Castaneda- Arce, 36—is a documented gang member with suspected ties to Mexican drug cartels. Officials also said that the suspect had served three years in prison for a previous drug offense. Searching Castaneda-Arce’s home, investigators reportedly discovered a kilogram of cocaine.

Campus police and the DEA initiated the undercover investigation, dubbed Operation Sudden Fall, in response to an SDSU coed’s death by cocaine overdose in May 2007. When a San Diego Mesa College student succumbed to oxycodone and alcohol poisoning at an SDSU fraternity in February 2008, authorities were prompted to step up their efforts.

“This investigation spotlights two tragedies,” said the DEA’s Special Agent in Charge, Ralph W. Partridge. “The tragic drug overdose deaths of two college students and, secondly, the shattered futures of those students who choose to engage in the illicit sale and usage of myriad controlled substances.”

During Operation Sudden Fall, DEA agents posing as students made more than 130 separate drug transactions with members of SDSU fraternities, and several members of Theta Chi and Phi Kappa Psi were among those arrested. Officials said that in some fraternities, nearly all of the members were aware that drug sales were being conducted within their own frat houses.

Two days after the raids, SDSU suspended six fraternities—Theta Chi, Phi Kappa Psi, Lambda Chi Alpha, Phi Kappa Theta, Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Sigma Alpha Mu—pending further investigation.

On the day of the bust, SDSU President Stephen L. Weber announced: “Certainly today’s arrests underscore the scope of the challenges universities face as we fight this major societal problem.We are determined to remove people from our community who have placed our students at risk and to see that they are turned over to the criminal justice system.”

Although Weber publicly hailed the arrests as a victory for San Diego State University, others have called the investigation unnecessary and ultimately ineffective. Following Operation Sudden Fall’s highly publicized conclusion, some campus groups have raised concerns over its impact on university life.

At a rally prompted by the raids, members of Students for Sensible Drug Policy—a national awareness organization committed to reducing the harms caused by drug abuse and drug policies— criticized the undercover operation. Randy Hencken, president of the organization’s SDSU chapter, believes the bust will likely have little effect on student drug use in the long run.

“We’ve seen those big piles of drugs and money on our TV screens before, over and over again, for the past three decades, and the availability of drugs has not changed,” Hencken proclaimed. “So long as students have the desire to use illegal drugs, and so long as the prohibition of drugs sustains a lucrative black market, drug stings will do little more than create openings for others to step in and supply these drugs.”

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Reza Farazmand is a University of California, San Diego junior majoring in political science and is news editor of the school’s student-run newspaper, The Guardian.

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By Robert Sheer

Welcome to Absurdistan, where destructive laws that make zero sense stay on the books for 20 years. What does it take to get America’s Congress to admit a mistake and correct it?

Of all the family-wrecking absurdities embedded in the so-called “War on Drugs,” the poster child has to be the discriminatory way African-Americans busted for crack cocaine offenses receive 100-times-more-severe sentences than whites convicted of the same crimes involving powder coke. Under the mandatory crack sentencing law introduced in Congress in 1986 by North Carolina tobacco money addict Senator Jesse Helms and passed without hearings or serious debate, a dealer caught carrying 499 grams of cocaine powder could be treated lightly, but someone who bought 5 grams from that dealer and put it into a microwave with baking soda and water, cooking it into crack, would be banished to a federal prison for five years without possibility of parole.

More than 80% of those sentenced to federal prison for crack offenses are black, while whites predominate among powdered-cocaine users. Before 1986, the average federal drug sentence for African-Americans was 11% higher than for whites; just four years later, the average federal drug sentence for African-Americans was 49% higher.

Supporters of the crack laws would have us believe this is a regrettable coincidence, that crack is really different enough from powdered cocaine to justify a 100-to-1 disparity in sentencing. Two decades of social research and hard science, however, have decimated this argument.

“Cocaine is cocaine,” Dr. Marian W. Fischman wrote in a definitive 1996 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which established that crack is not in any fundamental way different in its impact than other forms of cocaine. “Regardless of whether you shoot it up or smoke it or snort it, it has the same stimulant effect.”

Since that report, the other nonracial arguments made in support of differentiated sentencing for crack and powder have been systematically rebutted. More addictive? Negative. Causes more violent behavior? Uh-uh. More damaging to fetuses? An urban legend.

In fact, the “crack baby” crisis which sold so many newspapers in the ’80s was a media creation without basis in science, according to Dr. Deborah Frank, professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine, who has researched the issue for years. Crack has the same effect on children in the womb as powder cocaine—and, in terms of birth defects, the effects were quite similar to those caused by tobacco, a legal high.

Of course, crack, sold in small smokeable fragments, is cheaper than powder coke, which is one reason it spread so fast through the nation’s urban cores in the ’80s. But crystal meth—“redneck crack”—is cheaper still, and arguably more damaging and crazy-making.

Nevertheless, primarily because of the ridiculous crack sentences, African-Americans now serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense—at 58.7 months—as whites do for a violent offense—at 61.7 months—according to an October 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union. While African-Americans make up 15% of the country’s drug users, they comprise 37% of those arrested for drug violations, 59% of those convicted and 74% of those sentenced to prison for drug offenses.

From 1986 to 1991, while the number of blacks imprisoned for violent offenses rose by about the same amount as whites (31,000 and 33,000, respectively), the number of blacks imprisoned for drug offenses increased four times as much as the increase for whites (66,000 vs. 15,000), according to a Human Rights Watch report. This occurred at a time when survey data showed that five times as many whites were using drugs as blacks. Since 1986, the incarceration rate for African-American women has soared 800%, largely driven by drug convictions.

Because of these and similar numbers proving the current system is racist, the federal Sentencing Commission has, to no avail, issued a series of reports urging the crack/powder disparity be addressed by lawmakers immediately. (In 2005 the Supreme Court decided mandatory sentencing violated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution; the effects of this rule will take years to see.) The commission found not only consistent patterns of race-based punishment, but also was frustrated that the severe sentences were completely out of proportion to the scale of the crimes.

“Mandatory penalties for crack cocaine offenses apply most often to offenders who are low-level participants in the drug trade,” the commissioners wrote, citing data showing that 73% of crack defendants are merely street-level dealers, couriers or lookouts.

Of course, if we were actually winning the War on Drugs, some hard-hearted folks could be expected to accept such inequities based on the break-eggs-to-make-an-omelette view of problem-solving. Unfortunately, this war is as much a lose-lose quagmire as the real war over in Iraq—and is similarly expensive, costing an estimated $40 billion a year.

Prohibition has failed equally to stamp out markets and to increase street prices for heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana.

The evidence of failure is everywhere: Marijuana is now the nation’s number one cash crop—worth more than the corn and wheat crops combined—even as a record number of Americans were arrested for marijuana violations in 2005 (nearly 800,000, according to the FBI). After we’ve spent nearly 5 billion in taxpayer dollars since 2000 on planes fumigating Colombia’s coca crop, farmers there are producing just as much cocaine as before, according to drug journalist Neil Peirce. Prices for drugs across the United States are low and purity high, despite the highest incarceration rates in the industrialized world. Simply put, the hard-line approach has been tried and failed.

If we are feeling generous, we can allow that back in 1986, in the hysterical wake of star B-baller Len Bias’s tragic death days after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics (and the bloody turf fights then erupting in America’s toughest neighborhoods over control of the drug trade), Congress was not being racist when it passed the crack laws. However, just as Bias was believed to have died smoking crack but was discovered to have been using powder cocaine, the facts long since should have shocked our leaders into rectifying their mistake.

That it hasn’t is a clear indictment that racism is alive and still powerful in the United States almost 150 years after the end of slavery.