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Fact 2: A balanced approach of prevention,
enforcement, and treatment is the key in the fight against drugs.
Over the years,
some people have advocated a policy that focuses narrowly on controlling
the supply of drugs. Others have said that society should rely on treatment
alone. Still others say that prevention is the only viable solution.
As the 2002 National Drug Strategy observes, “What the nation needs
is an honest effort to integrate these strategies.”
Drug treatment
courts are a good example of this new balanced approach to fighting
drug abuse and addiction in this country. These courts are given a special
responsibility to handle cases involving drug-addicted offenders through
an extensive supervision and treatment program. Drug court programs
use the varied experience and skills of a wide variety of law enforcement
and treatment professionals: judges, prosecutors, defense counsels,
substance abuse treatment specialists, probation officers, law enforcement
and correctional personnel, educational and vocational experts, community
leaders and others — all focused on one goal: to help cure addicts
of their addiction, and to keep them cured.
Drug treatment
courts are working. Researchers estimate that more than 50 percent of
defendants convicted of drug possession will return to criminal behavior
within two to three years. Those who graduate from drug treatment courts
have far lower rates of recidivism, ranging from 2 to 20 percent.
That’s very impressive when you consider that; for addicts who
enter a treatment program voluntarily, 80 to 90 percent leave by the
end of the first year. Among such dropouts, relapse within a year is
generally the rule.
What makes drug
treatment courts so different? Graduates are held accountable for sticking
with the program. Unlike other, purely voluntary treatment programs,
the addict—who has a physical need for drugs—can’t simply
quit treatment whenever he or she feels like it.
Law enforcement
plays an important role in the drug treatment court program. It is especially
important in the beginning of the process because it often triggers
treatment for people who need it. Most people do not volunteer for drug
treatment. It is more often an outside motivator, like an arrest, that
gets —and keeps—people in treatment. And it is important for
judges to keep people in incarceration if treatment fails.
There are already
more than 123,000 people who use heroin at least once a month, and 1.7
million who use cocaine at least once a month. For them, treatment is
the answer. But for most Americans, particularly the young, the solution
lies in prevention, which in turn is largely a matter of education and
enforcement, which aims at keeping drug pushers away from children and
teenagers.
The role of strong
drug enforcement has been analyzed by R. E. Peterson. He has broken
down the past four decades into two periods. The first period, from
1960 to1980, was an era of permissive drug laws. During this era, drug
incarceration rates fell almost 80 percent. Drug use among teens, meanwhile,
climbed by more than 500 percent. The second period, from 1980 to 1995,
was an era of stronger drug laws. During this era, drug use by teens
dropped by more than a third.
Enforcement of
our laws creates risks that discourage drug use. Charles Van Deventer,
a young writer in Los Angeles, wrote about this phenomenon in an article
in Newsweek. He said that from his experience as a casual user—and
he believes his experience with illegal drugs is “by far the most
common” —drugs aren’t nearly as easy to buy as some critics
would like people to believe. Being illegal, they are too expensive,
their quality is too unpredictable, and their purchase entails too many
risks. “The more barriers there are,” he said, “be they
the cops or the hassle or the fear of dying, the less likely you are
to get addicted….The road to addiction was just bumpy enough,”
he concluded, “that I chose not to go down it. In this sense, we
are winning the war on drugs just by fighting them.”
The element of
risk, created by strong drug enforcement policies, raises the price
of drugs, and therefore lowers the demand. A research paper, Marijuana
and Youth, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, concludes
that changes in the price of marijuana “contributed significantly
to the trends in youth marijuana use between 1982 and 1998, particularly
during the contraction in use from 1982 to 1992.” That contraction
was a product of many factors, including a concerted effort among federal
agencies to disrupt domestic production and distribution; these factors
contributed to a doubling of the street price of marijuana in the space
of a year.
The 2002 National
Drug Control Strategy states that drug control policy has just two elements:
modifying individual behavior to discourage and reduce drug use and
addiction, and disrupting the market for illegal drugs. Those two elements
call for a balanced approach to drug control, one that uses prevention,
enforcement, and treatment in a coordinated policy. This is a simple
strategy and an effective one. The enforcement side of the fight against
drugs, then, is an integrated part of the overall strategy.
 
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