The Residue Years by Mitchell Jackson Page A

Muddy that.) Nice of you to join us. I was worried you’d miss your turn, he says. How long before you’re ready? The thick of Haskins’s specs, you’d believe him if he claimed he could see outer space. He twirls a stick of chalk. He settles in a desk in the front and crosses his legs.
    It won’t take long, I say. I fleece my pockets for a tissue, pat my face, search my bag for my speech, and ramble up to the lectern. I clear my throat, look out at the room, a class as full as it’s been all quarter, at Haskins sitting in the front row, a critique sheet on his desk. Good morning, I say. My name is Shawn Thomas and my speech is called “The Bias Effect.”
    * * *
    Here’s the forty-four-billion-dollar question:
    What’s the link between the NBA lottery and America’s War on Drugs?
    The answer: Leonard Kevin Bias.
    The über-ballyhooed Len Bias, that is.
    [Pause. Eyes.]
    This year marks the tenth anniversary of the night the Boston Celtics selected the former Maryland Terrapin with the number two pick in the NBA draft. The six-foot-eight small forward with the liquid jumper and bionic legs was everybody’s pick for the next coming, a talent to rival Michael Jordan, some said maybe better than Jordan, a player who could fuel the league for years to come. Well, Bias didn’t transform the B-ball universe alive, but his death from a cocaine overdose forty-eight hours after that draft sure has metamorphosed America.
    [Pause. Eyes.]
    Soon after Bias’s death, House Speaker Tip O’Neill (rest in peace), let’s call him Commissioner Tip O’Neill, inflamed by the death of a player who’d become a neutron star in what was known as the DMV, and whom Tip, not ironically the representative of Boston, believed had died of a crack overdose because he was black, convinced his Democrats they needed a swift and stern response.
    If you think Commissioner Tip’s game plan was all about Bias and pursuit of the greatest public good, think again. It was an election year and the donkeys were dead set on socking it to the GOP, who’d won two years prior in no small part by convincing voters their rivals were “too soft on crime.”
    All right, so even if the Dems’ motives weren’t wholly pure, at least they had the sense to seek counsel. There was no way anexperienced group of lawmakers could fathom drafting a bill without research, facts, testimonies, expert opinions.
    Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
    [Eyes.]
    The response of Commissioner Tip and his collective of vote-seeking senators was about as soft as the bad-boy Detroit Pistons. That answer was called the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The bill, which volleyed for a spate between the House and the Senate, was ratified that October; it passed sans a single secondary expert opinion, with all of zero hearings, without conversation the first with a single person from the Bureau of Prisons, minus insight from even one judge, sitting or retired or dead and brought back to life.
    [Eyes.]
    It was a tough, big, attention-grabbing bill, infamous for a draconian-like feature that had been outlawed since the 1970s: a mandatory minimum, more specifically the hundred-to-one ratio.
    [Pause. Pause. Eyes.]
    What that ratio means is this: it takes a hundred times the amount of soft cocaine to trigger the same penalty for crack cocaine.
    Tip and his boys set the triggers for first-time offenders at five and fifty grams. Five grams of what old-school dealers called “ready rock” earns a five-year federal bid. Fifty grams earns a ten-year set. By contrast, you’d need five hundred and five thousand grams of soft cocaine for that much time behind bars.
    [Pause. Eyes.]
    Let’s put that in furthur perspective? The average role player wandering the streets with five grams, what amounts to a fewrocks, in his pocket would receive the same sentence as a team starter toting a half kilo.
    It means the sixth-mantype dealer