Pubdate: Thu, 10 Aug 2006
Source: Peoria Journal Star (IL)
Copyright: 2006sPeoria Journal Star
Contact:  http://pjstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/338
Note: Does not publish letters from outside our circulation area.
Author: Pam Adams
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?159 (Drug Courts)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)

TURNING TO TREATMENT, NOT PUNISHMENT

Opium, morphine, heroin.

Coca, cocaine, crack.

Speed, methamphetamine, and now, more potent forms of meth.

As researcher and drug historian Bill White has been saying for 
years, the history of drug abuse in America is a history of 
ever-evolving drugs and an ever-quickening pace of drug ingestion. 
The drugs get stronger, the route to "high" gets faster. Sniff it, 
snort it, smoke it, shoot it.

In that vein, the quest to use drugs has yielded far more innovations 
than the politics of protecting us from drug abuse - and drug abusers 
from themselves. The next new crack/meth scourge is already making 
its way from science labs to the streets (and athletic fields).

If only our public policies regarding drug abuse were as creative as 
our penchant for quicker, more powerful modes of drug use. But that 
is where we get stuck in one mode. Over and over again.

The country's first narcotics law, passed in San Francisco in 1875, 
targeted Chinese immigrants, who became the scapegoats in a national 
drive to ban opium. In the 1900s, anti-cocaine laws targeted Southern 
blacks, though there was almost no evidence of cocaine use among 
African-Americans at the time. Early laws criminalizing heroin were 
aimed at European immigrants, mainly second-generation Irish. And the 
marijuana laws of the 1930s marked Mexican immigrants. Time and 
again, American prejudices have swayed American policies on drug 
abuse and treatment.

So it went when crack hit black neighborhoods and cocaine hit Wall 
Street in the 1980s. So it's going as meth makes its way from rural 
outposts to suburbs and cities. The pendulum swings too far to the 
right and hits, say, Rush Limbaugh. Large numbers of affluent - code 
word: white - people get mixed up with the law over drug abuse, then 
drug policies shift from the criminal justice system to treatment and 
recovery programs.

A five-day series on drug treatment and recovery ended in this 
newspaper on Monday. "Silent Treatment: Addiction in America" is 
notable because it's national in scope and unapologetic in its 
attempt to advocate for more drug treatment instead of tougher drug 
laws. It shines a light, unabashedly, on the strength it takes to 
recover instead of the deviancy it takes to abuse.

Perhaps more notably, crime is a minor theme of the series. And that 
is one more signal that the severely flawed, so-called war on drugs 
is whimpering to an end.

No one has announced an official exit strategy, no one's calling for 
victory celebrations. But renewed emphasis on drug treatment is 
apparent in the war's infrastructure. States have pulled back from 
the prison-building booms that fueled so much rural economic growth - 
and inner-city despair - beginning in the 1980s. Financial 
practicalities are forcing legislators to recognize, finally, that 
incarceration is about as much of a solution for modern drug 
epidemics as Prohibition was for alcohol.

Like Prohibition, the 1920s version of zero tolerance, the so-called 
war on drugs overwhelmed social networks in ways unexpected and 
unpredictable. And, just as states have pulled back from building 
prisons, courts have embraced drug treatment programs, through drug courts.

"Silent Treatment," the series, follows one drug abuser after another 
through recovery. "By me using drugs, I caused someone else to use 
drugs. I gloried in it, I sanctioned in it," said George Moorman, a 
54-year-old recovering crack addict who recently earned a doctoral 
degree in educational psychology. "I had to go back and clean up what 
I messed up."

Moorman, like many recovering drug abusers, came to recognize his 
personal responsibilities - but not without support from systems that 
realized effective public responsibilities.