Pubdate: Tue, 30 Nov 2004
Source: Lexington Herald-Leader (KY)
Copyright: 2004 Lexington Herald-Leader
Contact:  http://www.kentucky.com/mld/heraldleader/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/240
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)

A BETTER WEAPON

Fund, Expand Drug Treatment Program

When Lt. Gov. Steve Pence says that "we cannot and will not incarcerate our 
way out of this drug problem," people should sit up and listen.

A former federal prosecutor, Pence has spent the better part of a year 
leading a search for answers to Kentucky's drug abuse crisis.

Any effective solution, he says, will require a greater commitment to 
education, demand-reduction and treatment, while continuing to stress 
enforcement.

Incarceration alone may not be the answer, but it can provide a perfect 
opportunity for the other critical elements: education, demand-reduction 
and treatment.

It's a time when the 60 percent of inmates who are addicts have a better 
chance of getting clean; when, as one former cocaine trafficker told 
Herald-Leader reporter Sarah Vos, a jail sentence can become "a blessing."

Unfortunately, the recovery program which was that inmate's salvation could 
die of lack of funding.

No one questions the value of the Hope Therapeutic Program. But the grants 
that once funded it at the Fayette County jail have run out. And the Hope 
Center, which runs the jail program as well as a shelter and programs for 
the homeless, can no longer afford to keep it going.

City and state officials should, if necessary, dig deep to save the 
program, to expand it to include female prisoners and to take it or other 
drug-rehab programs to other county jails that have, all together, a 
population of 6,400 inmates.

No comprehensive study of the program's recidivism rates has been 
undertaken, but what is known is encouraging. In two years, 156 men have 
completed at least two months of the four-month Hope program before 
release, and only 13 have been rearrested in Fayette County.

Treatment may cost more in the beginning, but it's much cheaper in the long 
run than prison and all the other costs of addiction and addiction-fueled 
crime.

The futility of trying to incarcerate our way out of the drug problem was 
nicely illustrated by a news article that appeared alongside the one about 
the treatment program's funding woes.

Under an Owensboro dateline, we read that members of the illegal drug trade 
have responded to Kentucky's crackdown on the availability of 
methamphetamine ingredients by buying their supplies in other states.

Pence and the other members of his drug control assessment summit are right 
when they say that we can never whip the drug crisis without drastically 
reducing the demand for illegal drugs. And treating addicts and abusers 
while they're in jail is one way to do that.
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