One in 100 American citizens was incarcerated at some time last year ineither a city, county, state or federal criminal justice facility. It isestimated that over 60 percent of those incarcerated suffer from either a drugor alcohol abuse problem. 

Driving under-the-influence of alcohol is the number one cause of death onour highways. Drug users, including alcohol abusers, whether from overdose ordeteriorating health, and diseases like hepatitis, jam up our hospitalemergency wards. Yet, their primary problem is actually a treatable disease;Addiction. Alcoholics and Addicts most often drive without insurance andcontribute to high claim payouts for insurance companies, greatly affecting therates you and I pay for our own insurance, eating away at the insuringcompany’s profits. 

Addicts account for over half of the petty theft, and fill up jails behindthe charges when apprehended. Petty theft is one of the greatest overhead coststhat major retail sellers have… It affects every aspect of life in ourcountry… 

The New American, March 20, 2006:”

In January, construction workers at Leon Sheffield Elementary School inDecatur, Alabama, were stunned to discover that someone had made off with about60 feet of copper tubing, leaving the school flooded. A few weeks earlier,heavy rains had left a middle school in Portland, Oregon, flooded as well.Repair workers discovered that copper vents, flashing, and trim had beencannibalized from the school’s roof.” 

Acknowledged as a Disease by the American Medical Association, the AmericanPsychiatric Association, and the World Health Organization for decades, westill fail to embrace addressing the problem as a disease! Most Statesrecognize it as a disease and pour millions of dollars into programs inside oftheir prisons. Sadly, study after study finds these programs to be nearlyabsolute failures in nearly every case. A study completed in California in 2007actually stated that inmate participants of in-prison substance abuse treatmentprograms had a higher recidivism rate than the general population inmates. Ofcourse, as parolees they are monitored more closely than non-drug offenders,thus having more parole violations, returning them to prison. Still, with themajor financing direct at the prisons it is self-evident that the drug user hasto have moved to the convicted felon status to get treatment. This defies allour beliefs about treatment of disease. All diseases are most effectively dealtwith when early intervention takes place, and prevention is the best cure. Whyis this? 

It seems our State and Federal governments have chosen to multiply theirerror rather than admit that they have taken the wrong approach for what hasbecome decades. And, they continue to do this with “our” money, over and over.Why would they continue this course? Well, it is economics gone astray!Ignorance of the disease of Addiction, led to continued incarceration oftreatable Addicts for so long that Addiction literally exploded the prisonpopulations. So the States increased the prisons in size as first, buteventually drifted into a boom in building new prisons. Contracts awarded forconstruction, jobs staffing the prisons, and tremendous Federal subsidies haveturned our country’s State prison systems into an integral part of theireconomy. Once again, politics and old outdate theories, this happens to beregarding crime and punishment, have created another economic disaster that isso complicated no one wants to face it. On top of that, in California forexample, the Correctional Officers Union is the most powerful Union and lobbygroup in the State. 

For some reason the “drug problem” has slipped into the background in theMedia and on the political stage. The “War on Drugs” was a failure because itwas the wrong way to deal with a disease. Actually, it denied the problem aseven being a disease, so it was doomed to fail. For some reason, over the lasttwo decades we have chosen to shoot our way out of too many problems. I havenot heard one candidate, since the beginning of the primaries, even mention“drugs”! 

The drug problem is not going away as long as we do the same thing over andover expecting a different result. As long as it persists we will continue topay for it. Though we pay greatly in dollars, other ways we pay are even moredistressing. Broken homes, poorly parented children, absent parents andhomelessness are part of a broken family structure that may be the singlegreatest problem that the United States has ever had. Incarceration is not adeterrent to an Addict. It just simply is ineffective, and has proven to be,for a very long time. 

Addiction Treatment in the private sector is a different story. Whenaccepted as a relapsing disorder, as are diabetes and cancer, and multipleepisodes of treatment are provided and accepted as necessary, we are gettingbetter and better success rates. Addiction is a chronic, progressive and fatalmental disorder, accompanied by physiological complications. People have had atendency to want to give up on or throw away the Addict who relapses. Yet, wedon’t do that with diabetics or cancer victims. Putting a sick person in a cagewill not get them well. Addicts do not suffer from a lack of morals and willpower. They suffer from a chemically changed brain that can be restored nearlycompletely to a properly functioning organ. It is just very complicated by thefact that behavioral changes are a side effect that is a second issue that mustbe addressed. This is because memory reinforced over a long period of time isnot easily overcome. It’s the “old habits are hard to break” syndrome. It canbe done, though. Cognitive Behavioral Therapies have put a whole new face onthe treatment of Addiction. It provides a set course of objectives that aremeasurable in their effectiveness and variations of applied techniques and timeframes can produce positive results for a vast number of those being treated.Progression of the disease is predictable and assessable, and provide somewhatof a diagnosis of what stage an addiction is in. As with all diseases, theearlier it is identified, the sooner it can be assessed and a treatment courseinstituted. There is a third factor beyond the mental and physical that hasbeen identified as a great help to the treatment of “disease” in general thatapplies even more significantly to the disease of Addiction… SpiritualGrowth! 

So, what are going to do? Are we going to continue to treat this vastsegment of the population as “lepers”, stowing them away in our moderndungeons… throwing them away like broken objects? Or are we going to investmore wisely in a new approach that sees the potential of the human being? Ittook me a very long time to accept that I wasn’t just “a bad person”. It washard to believe that I could overcome the wreckage I had made of my life forsuch a long time. Most of all, though, it took a lot of Help! I made it though!After nearly 30 years of steady decline into hopelessness, I was brought out ofthe insanity by caring professionals and belief that something greater wouldlift me up and carry me when I had not the strength to do things myself! I amnot a detriment to society anymore. I no longer thrive on selfish needs. TheVeteran’s Administration invested in me and as a result not only am I no longeractive in my Addiction, but I’m a Drug Counselor, dedicating the rest of myworking life to helping others rise out of the depths of deprivation and becomeproductive members of Society!   

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