When then-Senator Joe Biden floated a brutal punishment for people found to be possessing crack cocaine, he likely had no idea that his son would seemingly run afoul of the proposal with such magnitude that it would have put him away for decades.
The so-called “100-1” rule, a standard for which Biden would years later claim responsibility, was a provision in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 that required a minimum five-year sentence for those caught with over 500 grams of cocaine. For the drug’s crack form, the ratio was even more punishing, with only five grams needed in possession to catch the 5-year mandatory sentence.
Biden later disavowed the strict provision and worked toward its eventual softening in 2010, but his leading role in the villainization of crack users has now come back to the forefront after an alleged hack of his son’s iCloud account.
When Biden pushed for the law, crack cocaine was almost exclusively used by black people, so the law affected almost no white people, yet nobody called him out.