Last week on my personal weblog, I ran an excerpt from Dan Baum’s essential book Smoke and Mirrors about how the 1986 overdose death of Maryland University basketball star Len Bias led to the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. The act is arguably the most militant, draconian crime-fighting bill ever passed by Congress.

Much of Baum’s book is told from the point of view of Eric Sterling, a congressional staffer who helped write most of the 1980s drug laws, but who has since become a vocal opponent of those laws, and of the drug war in general.

Yesterday, Sterling and Julie Stewart of Families Against Mandatory Minimums had an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that, sadly, the legacy of Bias’s death isn’t an end to the use of illicit drugs, but an exploding prison population, violence, and increased drug use — all caused not by Bias’s death, but by Congress’s overreation to it.

Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page covered similar ground this week.