Len Bias: The NBA Draft Star and His Overdose – The Death That Changed America

Maryland’s chief medical examiner attributed Bias’ death directly to cocaine. He said it “interrupted the normal electrical control of his heartbeat, resulting in a sudden seizure and cardiac arrest.”

Tribble was tried on charges of supplying cocaine that night, but was found not guilty.

“I love Lenny Bias,” he said outside the courtroom. “I always am, I always will.”

In 1990, three years later, Tribble would be sentenced to 10 years for dealing cocaine on a large scale.

Tribble’s conviction was just one of millions in the wider ‘War on Drugs’ that has dominated the policies of successive US administrations.

Between 1980 and 2009, adult arrest rates for drug possession or use increased by 138% in the United States,, external with the largest increase in the first decade of that 30-year period.

Bias’s death, at his physical peak, with a future ahead of him, was part of the justification for tougher sentences for smaller quantities of certain drugs.

“Len Bias, he was the man — he was going to be the next superstar,” says historian David Farber, author of The War on Drugs: A History.

“I grew up in Chicago, I grew up with Michael Jordan, but there were people saying ‘he’s going to take Jordan’. There was a fear that Bias would go to the Celtics, he was that good.

“The Speaker of the House at the time of his death was Tip O’Neill, who could see the November 1986 midterm elections coming up.

“He realized that a lot of people were scared that this superstar athlete, this incredibly fit young man, had fallen victim to a cocaine overdose. O’Neal represented Boston, he was a Celtics fan. It was really good policy for him to pay attention to the specifics of Len Bias’ death “.

O’Neill, a Democrat, realized that his party could not afford to be seen as weak on an issue that was seeping into the psyche of American voters.

“Time magazine and Newsweek were the media that middle-class Americans read at the time. “They had huge circulations at this point and started pumping crack as the new American nightmare,” says Farber.

“Crack wasn’t something white, middle-class and suburban youth used either.” But that was a great ‘what if?’.

“Bias didn’t use crack, he died of an overdose of powder cocaine, but that’s not what people perceived at the time.”

O’Neill was the driving force behind the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which became draconian the more it was debated.

“This law started to turn into a bidding war over who could punish drug dealers and users more,” Farber explains.

“Usually you negotiate – Labor and Capital, they find a way to fight and compromise.

“But there was no negotiation about this, it was like, ‘Let’s put them away for five years?’ No, let’s put them at 10 years! Let’s reduce the amount of crack that lands you in jail from 100g to 50g! Actually, how about 10 g?’

“Len Bias was at the center of all this. Here is this superhero who becomes an emblem of what drug abuse can do to the best of us.”

In October 1986, just over four months after Bias’ death, President Ronald Reagan signed the Drug Abuse Control Act in the East Room of the White House.

The law specifies the quantities of certain drugs that would trigger criminal prosecution for possession. For crack cocaine, the level is set at 5g. For powder cocaine – the more expensive drug that killed Bias – the minimum sentence for conviction in both cases was five years without parole.

It also established a minimum sentence of 20 years for anyone convicted of dealing drugs that caused death or serious injury.

“This bill is not intended as a means of filling our prisons with drug users,” Reagan told reporters.

But its effect was just that.

In 1986, the US prison population was 522,064. Ten years later, there were more than 1.1 million., external

“It just started taking young people and throwing them in jail in droves,” Farber says.

“Poor communities – especially poor black communities – have been hit very hard. Crack was a drug that was tailor-made for poor people because it was cheap, produced a really strong and immediate high, and could be played over and over again.

“In the United States, we’re talking about a cancer state, a state built around putting people in prison, and that starts with the crack cocaine hysteria.”