Pubdate: Thu, 23 Nov 2000
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2000 Houston Chronicle
Contact:  Viewpoints Editor, P.O. Box 4260 Houston, Texas 77210-4260
Fax: (713) 220-3575
Website: http://www.chron.com/
Forum: http://www.chron.com/content/hcitalk/index.html
Author: Thom Marshall

TREATMENT IS KEY TO DRUG WAR EFFORTS

For 23 years Michael Schiltz worked as a volunteer, answering an area
hot line, providing crisis intervention, often referring other parents
to drug rehab facilities for their children.

For almost 20 years he also has served as a catechist and a
facilitator in teen programs at an area Catholic church. So, long
before his own four children were born (all are under age 18), Schiltz
was hearing about, working with, getting to know, and learning from
teen-agers, about their good times and bad.

Schiltz is 50, which means his own teen-age years were experienced in
the 1960s, that psychedelic decade when so many young people were
rebelling against the establishment, demonstrating against the Vietnam
War and experimenting with a wide variety of illegal substances. And
those who didn't experiment learned about drugs and their effects from
friends and from the movies and rock music and the media coverage.

In addition, Schiltz and his wife both have master's
degrees.

However, despite that accumulation of experience and education,
Schiltz said one of his children became involved with drugs and
managed to conceal that involvement for two years.

Effective program elusive Schiltz said he could tell by behavior
changes that there was a problem -- cut classes, failing grades. The
child was tested twice, but the illegally obtained prescription drugs
the child consumed before those tests did not show up in the results.

It wasn't until August that Schiltz finally discovered the child did
indeed have an addiction problem that involved a wide range of
substances -- basically, whatever could be obtained, and often
consumed with alcohol. "I immediately sought help," Schiltz said.
"However, I realized $5,000 per month for inpatient treatment was for
the insured and/or independently wealthy, which I was neither. No
problem. I had been counseling and providing drug rehab referrals for
23 years at the hot line, I would now seek the assistance of the
various referrals."

What he learned next came as a shock, he said, and left him wondering
about the true worth of all those volunteer hot line hours.

"I discovered that for every three referral calls made, I would end up
with nine new referrals and no real direction of where to go for
effective treatment," he said.

After four weeks of diligent searching, he located Cornerstone, a
program that seemed worthy, in part, because it is "parent-intensive,"
Schiltz said. "Which it should be, assuming you have parents that will
understand and accept the addiction as a disease," and providing the
parents aren't battling their own problems so that they cannot commit
the necessary time.

Parents, teachers must learn This man believed for years that he was
providing worthwhile support in drug war efforts. Then his own family
suffered a casualty. What he believes now, he said, is:

"The drug war is a total failure if the goal was to win it. Nearly
everyone is a victim in this war. Regardless of where we start
surveying the battlefield, the conclusion will be the same: We have
lost. Not only have we lost the war, we don't provide or have adequate
MASH-type units to treat the numerous causalities. We lie to ourselves
thinking that we have adequate treatment programs, but in reality we
are just adjusting the blinders so we don't have to see the damage."

He said funding should be redirected from the huge enforcement budget
to increasing and improving treatment programs.

He favors treatment programs operated within the public education
system but said they should be "parent driven." We also should have
more teachers, he said, and they should be trained "to recognize and
understand the problems associated with drug use and the recovery
process." He said we should increase teacher salaries "but demand
better teacher performance."

He also believes that decriminalizing drug use and legalizing some
illegal substances would "bring the war out of the underground and
into the open battlefield."

When we talked earlier this week, Schiltz said his child had been
straight for 75 days.
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