In response to Mr. Dickson”s Oct. 1 editorial on substance abuse and child maltreatment. First let me say how much I appreciate the Record-Bee consistently printing contact information and meeting information to the counties various 12-step and other substance abuse treatment options. It is a wonderful gift to the county.
I wanted mainly to address the way our society likes to differentiate between legal and illegal substance use and the harms they cause.
Gary Dickson”s editorial points out that there is an enormous financial cost of illegal drug abuse and an enormous amount of child abuse and neglect that is associated with illegal drug abuse and finally a very large and expensive disease burden fueled by illegal drug abuse.
Unfortunately, when our society makes the arbitrary differentiation between legal and illegal drugs and behaviors we start down a path that causes us to make policy decisions with disastrous outcomes.
The financial cost: the editorial correctly pointed out that arrests for illegal drugs have nearly doubled since the 1980s.
This policy comes with great costs.
The cost of incarcerating each prisoner in California is $47,102 per year.
This means that in 2009 we, the taxpayers, spent approximately $1,353,523,072 to incarcerate drug offenders.
Besides the expense of this, because we differentiate between legal and illegal substances, we make and accept policy decisions to incarcerate 28,000 people who should have been given treatment instead of incarceration.
We have known for decades that drug treatment works and that incarcerating addicts does not work. Nonetheless, as a state we have decided to take the path that we know doesn”t work and we waste more than $1 billion per year.
In April the American Society of Addiction Medicine released its definition of addiction. Two of the important concepts in the definition as it relates to drug policy are “Addiction is a primary, chronic disease …” and “Addiction is characterized by inability to consistently abstain …” Together these two ideas beg us to ask ourselves the question, is it OK to incarcerate people because they have a disease they have not yet learned to control?
I know we are quick to point out that the drug addict chooses to use drugs and is therefore responsible for his/her disease and therefore should be held criminally liable. But it is also true that the tobacco smoker chose to smoke the cigarettes that gave him/her lung cancer?
If we really believe our criminal drug policy makes sense than we must also incarcerate people with tobacco driven lung cancer, but we don”t.
Instead with this population we do the right thing and tell how sorry we are that it happened and we medically treat them in attempt to reduce the harm done to the sufferer.
Why can”t we do this for people with the disease of addiction?
We can”t do that because we have decided to maintain the untruth that there is some significant difference between illegal drug users and legal drug users.
Jeff Ott
Glenhaven
