Most of us know someone who abuses one drug or another. If it hasn’t personally affected you, you’ve still seen the arrests of local drug addicts on MLive or heard of heroin use increasing throughout the tri-cities and entire state. Drug addiction can ruin careers and tear families and friends apart.
Why don’t we spend the billions of dollars that we use for the war on drugs and put it toward community outreach programs, support and rehabilitation for some of the most vulnerable people in our society?
The Federal Drug Control Budget cost federal government $26 billion in 2015. Sadly, less than 45 percent of this is devoted to treatment, education and prevention.
Many Americans the best way to treat substance abusers is as criminals. Since President Reagan declared substance abuse “public enemy number one” in 1971 the war on drugs has not effectively helped to rehabilitate and/or support addicts. Instead we treat nonviolent drug crimes with jail time and arrests.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 48 percent of inmates in federal prison were serving time for drug offenses in 2011. An estimated 40 percent of released prisoners were arrested for a new crime within three years of their release in 2011, according to a PEW Research Center study. That is not rehabilitation, is it criminalization.
The most effective way of reducing drug use is accepting that discipline doesn’t work. Dependence to a narcotic is not comparable to larceny or theft. Addiction itself is not a crime, it is a disorder, and must be treated as a social issue.
In her article, “What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?”, Reporter Katherine Reynolds Lewis of Mother Jones asks, “Does it make sense to impose the harshest treatments on the most challenging kids? And are we treating chronically misbehaving children as though they don’t want to behave, when in many cases they simply can’t?”
Simply throwing addicts into prison disenfranchises them, and once they are thrown back into the world they do not have the skills to complete. They are forced to return to the people they knew, the ones who may have enabled the addiction that led them into the prison system to begin with.
Relapsing is fairly common, and all addicts should have access to a rehabilitation program. The focus of drug control should be on providing treatment for those who are struggling with addiction, not punishing them.