Drug prohibition allows for massive disparity in sentencing, and this disparity is one of the many reasons millions of Americans see it as the new Jim Crow. President Barack Obama signed into law a bill to reduce the disparity between federal mandatory sentences for convictions for crack cocaine and the powder form of the illegal drug. The quarter-century-old law that Congress changed with the bill Obama signed subjected tens of thousands of black cocaine users to long prison terms while specifying far more lenient sentences to those, mainly whites, caught with powder cocaine.