Pubdate: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 Source: Lexington Herald-Leader (KY) Copyright: 2006 Lexington Herald-Leader Contact: http://www.kentucky.com/mld/heraldleader/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/240 Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment) CHANGING TACTICS Recovery Programs Crucial To Winning Drug War Think about the families fractured this holiday because of drug abuse. Some missing family members are in prison; some are dead. Some may be around the house, but not really present. No one thinks drug abuse is OK. The question is how best to fight it. There are signs that the answer is shifting toward fighting drug abuse one person at a time, helping users recover, preventing others from getting hooked. It's slow, it's personal, it's expensive. But without it, history and economics say, we are doomed to failure. Enforcement agencies and the general public have developed a sort of addiction to the quick fix of drug raids. Often conducted in the early morning with an eager media on hand, the raids provide gratifying images of disheveled accused dealers and users -- hands bound, disappearing into squad cars or courthouses. We've seen them over and over, each time enjoying the temporary high of feeling like a problem has been solved. But the frequency tells us it's not working. Operation UNITE -- Eastern Kentucky's largest anti-drug program, which operate in 29 counties and has a budget of more than $9 million - -- says that in less than two years it conducted 49 drug roundups, arrested 1,372 people and removed or seized drugs with a street value of almost $5.8 million. But that's not working. "We tried for the past 50 years to arrest our way out of this problem, but it did not, has not and will not work," Dan Smoot, head of UNITE's law enforcement division, recently told The Associated Press, explaining why the focus and budget are shifting from enforcement to prevention. In the cold terms of economics, this shift acknowledges that supply will always follow demand. If people are willing to destroy their lives to get the money to buy drugs, the market will find drugs to sell them. The remarkable and hopeful news is that it is possible for drug users to stop. Comprehensive drug treatment programs work. Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told a congressional committee this year that in a Delaware study, 70 percent of inmates who participated in prison-based drug treatment and who continued working with a treatment group after release remained arrest-free after three years. Other research has shown that on average, people struggling with drug addictions work harder to get well and stay well than people with other chronic diseases, such as diabetes or hypertension. It may not be a trend, but there are signs, in addition to UNITE's announcement, that Kentucky is moving toward an approach that offers some hope of stopping the cycle of abuse rather than just interrupting it. UNITE also has dedicated resources toward prevention: placing substance-abuse counselors in schools to identify students who are at risk and to help them avoid addiction; providing incentives to school districts to develop research-based approaches to drug abuse prevention; and engaging students in leading programs. Even with these initiatives, though, UNITE still has more money ($3.1 million this year) allocated to enforcement than to education ($2.4 million) or to treatment ($2.7 million.) This fall, Gov. Ernie Fletcher announced plans to build 10 residential treatment centers around the state, each capable of treating about 100 adults at a time. In Lexington this month, the first four women graduated from an intensive four-month recovery program begun this year at the Fayette County Detention Center. That's all good, but it's not enough. Each drug abuser is at the center of an ever-widening arc of family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, crime victims and even taxpayers who suffer because of the addiction. Enforcement will always be and must be an important part of the picture. Law-abiding people need to know they are safe; drug dealers need to know they aren't. But the fractured lives and families will have a chance to become whole only through treatment. We've got to wean ourselves from the quick fix of drug busts and commit to destroying drug abuse at its source. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek