I think the Equal Protection clause requires methamphetamine dealers to be sentanced like crack dealers are
Quotes of note:
For local residents, who presumed Katie had been abducted by a stranger, the tragedy deepened with the arrest on murder charges of Charles Hickman, 20, a fixture in front of his family's trailer on Crothersville's main street, just across from the Dollar General and Penn Villa.
"It's changed too late," said Misty Banks, who works at the Butcher Block convenience store, where she gave Reese's peanut butter cups and Popsicles to Katie even when she could not pay. "They've known it's been going on this whole time, and they have to wait until a 10-year-old's dead?"
Too Late for Katie, Town Tackles a Drug's Scourge
By JODI WILGOREN
CROTHERSVILLE, Ind., Feb. 9 - John Neace forces himself to pass by the run-down apartment buildings every day. Inside, the police say, Mr. Neace's 10-year-old daughter stumbled on someone with methamphetamine last month. Her drowned body was found five days later at a nearby creek, small hands tied tightly behind her back.
...Katie's Jan. 25 disappearance, and the Feb. 2 arrest of an unemployed high school dropout, have shaken this small town out of silence about the scourge of methamphetamine.
Like many similar communities across the nation's midsection, Crothersville, 40 miles north of Louisville and with a population of 1,541, has seen methamphetamine steadily seep into its streets.
When the roof of a house behind the funeral home exploded in December, a makeshift meth lab was found in the fire. Another lab, spitball distance from the school, was raided earlier last year. The uncle of the young man now facing charges of killing Katie wrote a letter to the town council two years ago beseeching the members to do something about drugs before someone got killed.
But many residents said they had been scared to report suspicions in a community where everyone seems somehow related. Others complained that the three-man police force too often looks the other way - the man who lived at the house behind the funeral home has yet to face charges, and two complaints about methamphetamine use at the dilapidated Penn Villa apartments in the days before Katie's death yielded no arrests.
