3 August 2010
Fair Sentencing Act reduces crack–powder disparity
United States; federal drug defendants
The Fair Sentencing Act raised the crack cocaine quantities triggering federal five- and ten-year mandatory minimums from 5 and 50 grams to 28 and 280 grams. This reduced the statutory crack–powder drug-quantity ratio from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1. It also repealed the special mandatory minimum for simple possession of crack cocaine.
Dates preserve the source’s precision. This entry is part of a selected historical record; its qualifications and sources are retained below.
Context / qualification
These are federal drug-quantity thresholds, not a ratio between every actual sentence. Guideline implementation followed in November 2010. The 2018 First Step Act later allowed discretionary sentence reductions for covered offenses committed before August 3, 2010; reductions were not automatic.