On his way to work one swampy June morning that year, Eric Sterling noticed in the paper that Len Bias had died the night before. Strange, Sterling thought; Bias was so young. But not being a sports fan, Sterling wasn’t much interested in the story.

Until he arrived at work.

It was like Pearl Harbor had just been bombed; nobody in the Longworth House Office Building was talking about anything but Bias …

Immediately upon returning from the July 4 recess, Tip O’Neill called an emergency meeting of the crime-related committee chairmen. Write me some goddamn legislation, he thundered. All anybody up in Boston was talking about was Len Bias. The papers were screaming for blood. We need to get out front on this now. This week. Today. The Republicans beat us to it in 1984 and I don’t want that to happen again. I want dramatic new initiatives for dealing with crack and other drugs. If we can do this fast enough, he said to the Democratic leadership arrayed around him, we can take the issue away from the White House.

In life, Len Bias was a terrific basketball player. In death, he would become the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs. What came before had been only skirmishing; the real Drug War had yet to begin. Within weeks the country would be marching, bayonets fixed …

Crack was a congressional member’s dream: an issue on which there was no real disagreement, only a question of who could prove himself more committed to the cause. Eric Sterling couldn’t tell whether Congress was leading television or vice versa. In the month following Bias’s death, the networks aired seventy-four evening news segments about crack and cocaine, often erroneously interchanging the two substances and blithely asserting it was crack that killed Bias . . .

In his seven years working for Congress, Sterling had never seen such a frenzy grip the Capitol. Usually, committees would hold hearings on a bill, refine points of law, and finally bring the bill into a markup session to polish the language. Now, though, members were having staff members draw up hardline proposals and rushing them straight into markup sessions — without benefit of hearings. Sterling found himself in one such session, in which members of the Crime Subcommittee found themselves, by the seat of their pants, writing laws to put the drug defendants’ attorneys in prison.

It’s not enough to seize their fees, Congressman Clay Shaw of Florida argued. “The only way we will get at this [drug] problem is to let the whole community, the whole population, know that [defense attorneys] are part of the problem and they could very well be convicted if they knowingly take these funds. Congressman Dan Lundgren of California, an attorney, wanted to exempt lawyers but nobody else who deals with a drug pusher. Make it illegal for a dry cleaner or a grocery store to take money from a drug dealer, he argued, and if they do, seize the business. Put the merchant in jail.

Some of the more clearly unconstitutional provisions didn’t make the cut. But the resulting bill was awful enough.

Where the 1986 drug law really departed from tradition was in its adoption of mandatory minimum sentences. In most cases where federal law speaks to a sentence, it is set to maximum limits … In nearly two hundred years, Congress had passed only fifty-eight mandatory minimum sentences.

In the aftermath of Len Bias’s death, Congress added another twenty-nine mandatory minimums — a fifty percent increase in four months … By the time Congress was finished, first-offense, small-quantity street dealing could result in a mandatory minimum of ten paroleless years in a federal prison …