Pubdate: Sat, 09 Dec 2000
Source: Blade, The (OH)
Copyright: 2000 The Blade
Contact:  541 North Superior St., Toledo OH 43660
Website: http://www.toledoblade.com/
Author: Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune columnist

NONVIOLENT DRUG ABUSERS NEED TREATMENT, NOT JAIL

WASHINGTON-- We didn't need any more dramatic examples of how drug
addiction should be treated as a health issue, but Robert Downey,
Jr.has given one to us anyway.

Like Darryl Strawberry, Downey just can't seem to keep illegal drugs
out of his bloodstream or his body out of jail.

While most of the rest of the country was enjoying Thanksgiving
weekend, Downey was getting busted for possession of cocaine and
methamphetamines in his Palm Springs, Calif., hotel room, after police
were alerted by a tipster.

The arrest comes barely three months after he left Corcoran State
Prison in California, where he served little more than a three-year
sentence. That sentence came after years of drug-related incidents,
arrests.

But the comedy masks our national astonishment: Downey had the money
and connections to get the best treatment possible. He also had a
bright future. He had just joined TV's "Ally McBeal" cast, received
rave reviews, and signed to begin two new movie deals. And after all
that, he still couldn't kick the habit? What's wrong with him?

Similar questions are raised by Strawberry, the former baseball star
and current colon cancer patient, who was arrested Oct. 25 after
walking away from a residential drug treatment center in Florida. He
had been under house arrest there for 1999 charges of drug possession
and soliciting a prostitute. While AWOL from the treatment center,
prosecutors say, he smoked crack cocaine and took 10 antidepressant
pills.

Do these men have a death wish? By their own accounts,
yes.

"Life hasn't been worth living for me, that's the honest truth," news
accounts quoted Strawberry as saying in court. "I am not afraid of
death."

It's "like I've got a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the
trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal," Downey told a judge
last year.

With those words, Strawberry and Downey speak for addicts everywhere.
They have a death wish, whether or not they realize it. The question
for the rest of users, do we want to help them pull the trigger? Or
can more of these sad cases be saved?

California voters recently approved an initiative to spend $60 million
to divert nonviolent drug abusers in the state's prison system into
treatment programs. Drug-related incarcerations grew 25-fold since
1980 in California, leading the nation, according to a study the
Justice Policy Institute released in July. Almost half of all drug
offenders imprisoned in California last year were imprisoned for
simple possession, the institute reported.

Other states should make similar moves. Nonviolent drug offenders have
grown Faster than just about any other category of criminals in our
nation's state prison population. Nearly one of four American prison
inmates is 'being held on drug-related offenses, the institute
reports. The number of violent offenders entering state prisons has
doubled, and the number of nonviolent prisoners has tripled.

Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.) has proposed federal funding for states
that seek to divert nonviolent drug offenders into treatment instead
of prison.

On the Republican side, you have small-government drug reformers like
Rep. Tom Campbell of California who has argued for more prison
drug-treatment programs and even experiments in supplying drugs to
addicts the way Zurich, Switzerland, tried with mixed success.

Michigan's Republican Gov. John Engler also has endorsed modifying his
state's mandatory sentencing for drug offenders to encourage more
treatment. New York's Republican Gov. George Pataki has talked about
making similar modifications in that state's get-tough drug laws.

We have a fought a war on drugs -- as Reagan used to say about Lyndon
Johnson's war on poverty -- and drugs have won. A major reason is our
failure to treat the conditions, psychological and otherwise, that
lead users to abuse the stuff in the first place.

As jailbirds go, Downey and Strawberry put a face on America's drug
plague that the movies seldom show. Neither Downey nor Strawberry has
stuck a gun under anyone's nose or busted open a parking meter to get
the change inside.

At its best, the criminal justice system has helped stop drug
addicts.from killing themselves. But when it lets nonviolent offenders
back on the street without treating the conditions psychological, and
otherwise, that feed the addiction, the system only feeds the problem
it is trying to prevent. 
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