Pubdate: Sun, 01 Feb 2015
Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (WI)
Copyright: 2015 Journal Sentinel Inc.
Contact: http://www.jsonline.com/general/30627794.html
Website: http://www.jsonline.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/265
Author: Emily Mills

LET'S HAVE EMPATHY FOR DRUG USERS

We are a deeply punitive society. One misstep, one act of poor 
judgment, one stroke of bad luck or fate, and you could be marked for 
life, a pariah, someone with whom the rest of us "good people" want 
nothing to do.

Drug users are a prime example of this sad philosophy. The most 
recent manifestation of our collective attitude of non-forgiveness 
comes courtesy of Gov. Scott Walker's expected budget proposal to 
require drug tests for all FoodShare and BadgerCare applicants, as 
well as certain recipients of unemployment benefits.

There's a token nod to providing treatment and job training to those 
who test positive, but little in the way of details about how these 
programs would be paid for and implemented.

The move also appears to be largely one of political posturing: The 
federal government bars states from adding any new eligibility 
requirements for FoodShare applicants, so Wisconsin would need to 
apply for a waiver from the Obama administration in order to 
implement these new policies. It seems almost certain that won't happen.

Rightly so, too. If the argument is that people don't want "taxpayer 
money" going to feed, shelter and treat people who use illegal drugs, 
then we should, first and foremost, be testing our elected officials. 
After all, who gets more taxpayer money than they do? Somehow, 
however, I doubt a bill requiring such a thing would ever make it out 
of committee, let alone pass into law.

The point, however, shouldn't be to further stigmatize and punish 
those people who use or abuse illicit substances. These are precisely 
the folks who would benefit most from real support, some semblance of 
comfort and a sense of hope and possibility for their future. Letting 
them starve, fall ill and become isolated will only make their -and 
our - situation worse.

I recently read a fascinating article about studies that have been 
done over the last several decades that absolutely tear apart our 
usual thinking when it comes to drug use and addiction. Conservatives 
tend to blame it all on moral failing and individual responsibility. 
Liberals tend to blame it all on chemical dependence and disease.

But what these studies are finding is something else entirely, and it 
makes policies like those in Walker's new budget all the more 
wrongheaded and dangerous: Addiction is not the result of moral 
failing or chemical dependence. It is, these studies show, the result 
of lack of human connection. The take-away is that, in order to 
really combat addiction, we need to make sure that people have 
healthy environments in which to live.

"If we can't connect with each other," writes Johann Hari, author of 
"Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, "we 
will connect with anything we can find - the whirr of a roulette 
wheel or the prick of a syringe. (The research scientist) says we 
should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 
'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she 
couldn't bond as fully with anything else. So the opposite of 
addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection."

That may sound overly woo-woo to some, but it makes a whole lot of 
sense to me - and to the scientists who ran the tests that proved it.

Instead of finding new ways to dump on and brush aside society's ills 
and those afflicted by them, we should be looking for ways to improve 
everyone's lot. This isn't a leg-up so much as it's a 
just-having-legs-in-the-first-place sort of proposal. It's funding 
for comprehensive treatment and training programs, yes. But it's also 
funding for public education, so people can learn and feel empowered 
to take control of their own lives, thereby finding ways to be 
productive members of society (that's a long-term investment we 
should all be able to get behind). It's funding social safety nets, 
so that when things go wrong that are outside of our control, we 
don't fall through the cracks and become a burden to ourselves and 
others. It's realizing that we all do better when we all do better.

We have to make a massive societal shift in attitude and 
understanding to really see this kind of positive change. It's 
disheartening to see our current elected officials actively working 
against that, but it's crucial that we all make the effort. Neighbor 
to neighbor. Bit by bit. We'll get there.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom