Nightline Tonight:

Get caught with five grams of crack cocaine, and the mandatory minimum sentence is five years. Five grams of powder cocaine? Probably not much will happen, especially if you're affluent or famous. It takes five hundred grams of powder cocaine to get the same five years sentence. In other words, it takes one hundred times the amount of powder to get you the same sentence as a crack user would get.

Why the 100 to 1 disparity?

"Most people believe now that a lot of the assumptions that were made back then are wrong. Crack may not be more addictive. It may not cause more violence. The feared epidemic of crack-addicted babies never materialized. So there is a fair amount of support for making the penalties more equal. But it's also an election year. President Bush, just days before his inauguration, said the penalties for crack and powder should be the same. Now the administration says that would signal a retreat in the war on drugs. So the inequality continues. And so do the consequences."

"Tonight Nightline correspondent Don Dahler will have our report, and Ted will anchor. Twenty years after crack was declared a threat to this country and Miami Vice made powder cocaine cool, it's time to look around again."

(Source: E-mail received today from Nightline)