Numerous authors, academics, and historians have asserted that the War on Drugs has been racially and politically motivated. As the crack epidemic spread across the country in the mid 1980s, Congress would pass the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Under these sentencing guidelines, five grams of crack cocaine, often sold by and to African-Americans, carried a mandatory five-year prison sentence. However, for powder cocaine, often sold by and to white Americans, it would take one hundred times that amount, or 500 grams, for the same sentence, leading many to criticize the law as discriminatory. The 100:1 sentencing disparity was reduced to 18:1 in 2010 by the Fair Sentencing Act. This was compounded by the fact that during the same time the law was passed, the right-wing Nicaraguan Contra rebels, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, were smuggling thousands of pounds of cocaine into the United States, cocaine that was making its way into American inner cities as crack. While the Reagan administration drastically escalated the War on Drugs, officials in the Reagan administration, including Oliver North, knew about and encouraged using drug money to fund the Contras. In 1989, the Kerry Committee report concluded the Contra drug links included... "Payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies". Despite these findings, it wasn't until 1996 where a reporter named Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News picked up on the story, linking the CIA-backed Contras to the crack epidemic. The outrage in the African-American community was enormous, particularly in South Central Los Angeles, where Congresswoman Maxine Waters served, and subsequently praised Webb's Dark Alliance series.