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Authors ›› Rehnquist
The current penalties for LSD distribution originated in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, Pub. L. 99-570, 100 Stat. 3207. Congress adopted a "market-oriented" approach to punishing drug trafficking, under which the total quantity of what is distributed, rather than the amount of pure drug involved, is used to determine the length of the sentence. [...] It intended the penalties for drug trafficking to be graduated according to the weight of the drugs in whatever form they were found -- cut or uncut, pure or impure, ready for wholesale or ready for distribution at the retail level. Congress did not want to punish retail traffickers less severely, even though they deal in smaller quantities of the pure drug, because such traffickers keep the street markets going. H. R. Rep. No. 99-845, (supra) , at pt. 1, p. 12.
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By measuring the quantity of the drugs according to the "street weight" of the drugs in the diluted form in which they are sold, rather than according to the net weight of the active component, the statute and the Sentencing Guidelines increase the penalty for persons who possess large quantities of drugs, regardless of their purity. [...] This is as true with respect to LSD as it is with respect to other drugs. Although LSD is not sold by weight, but by dose, and a carrier medium is not, strictly speaking, used to "dilute" the drug, that medium is used to facilitate the distribution of the drug.
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Petitioners argue that those selling different numbers of doses, and, therefore, with different degrees of culpability, will be subject to the same minimum sentence because of choosing different carriers. The same objection could be made to a statute that imposed a fixed sentence for distributing any quantity of LSD, in any form, with any carrier. Such a sentencing scheme -- not considering individual degrees of culpability -- would clearly be constitutional. Congress has the power to define criminal punishments without giving the courts any sentencing discretion. Ex parte United States, 242 U.S. 27 (1916).
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The [Fourth] Amendment is satisfied when, under the circumstances, it is objectively reasonable for the police to believe that the scope of the suspect's consent permitted them to open the particular container.
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[T]he Court has, as a general matter only, required the prosecution to demonstrate both the unavailability of the declarant and the "indicia of reliability" surrounding the out-of-court declaration. Last Term in United States v. Inadi, 475 U.S. 387 (1986), we held that the first of these two generalized inquiries, unavailability, was not required when the hearsay statement is the out-of-court declaration of a co-conspirator. Today, we conclude that the second inquiry, independent indicia of reliability, is also not mandated by the Constitution. [...] Accordingly, we hold that the Confrontation Clause does not require a court to embark on an independent inquiry into the reliability of [co-conspirator] statements...
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