If ever there was a time when the draconian Rockefeller Drug laws in New York State might be reformed, or, better yet, altogether repealed, then that time would now. The ravages of that law on Latino and African-American communities, which are disproportionately affected, are vast. But don't hold your breath. Every winter, like clockwork, this issue has come up on the political radar of the New York State Assembly, but little has changed. Politicians, especially from rural or upstate districts, don't want to be portrayed by their opposition as soft on such a fundamental law-and-order issue. And, we cannot fail to note cynically, the jobs at prisons that these laws create in rural upstate districts makes for another disincentive for reform. Governors have come to Albany and gone, and yet the Rockefeller Drug law remains, seemingly adamantine.

On May 3, 1973, when murder and robbery rates were significantly higher than they are now, then-Governor Rockefeller signed the bill containing some of the harshest drug laws in the nation. Rockefeller, a moderate Republican, was, at the time, mulling a White House run and wanted to toughen up his country club image among the party's red-meat base. The Rockefeller drug laws have largely remained, despite protests from so many disparate organizations and individuals, because of law-and-order electoral realities at the local level.

"Under these laws," wrote Anthony Papa, an ex-convict, in the Gotham Gazette, "people convicted of drug offenses face the same penalties as those convicted of murder, and harsher penalties than those convicted of rape." Papa spent a dozen years in the New York prison system under the Rockefeller Laws on a first-time non-violent drug offense. He has devoted his life to reforming those laws. Papa's prison autobiography is called "15 to Life: How I Painted My Way Top Freedom." That title comes from the fact that Rockefeller Drug Law statutes generally require judges to impose minimum 15-years to life sentences for anyone convicted of selling two ounces, or possessing four ounces of a "narcotic drug (marijuana included)."

Democrat Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, who voted against the laws in 1973, told Clyde Heberman of The New York Times, "We're on the precipice of real Rockefeller law reform." As of 2008, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, 14,000 people, or nearly 38% of state prisoners, are incarcerated for drug offenses. Last Thursday was 35th anniversary of the Rockefeller Law.