http://deseretnews.com/article/0,1249,695275913,00.html
By James Thalman
Deseret News
Published: Sunday, May 4, 2008 12:30 a.m. MDT
In a word, everybody's crazy about drugs.
Whether by prescription or on the street, whether you like your pill
dressed in Pfizer blue or prefer little dull ones stamped with a bat
emblem, love them or hate them, we've got a thing for drugs.
Government agencies of every variety want to control or get rid of
them altogether, while every little criminal =97 from the two-bit
grifter on the corner to the really nice doctor eight floors above =97
seem to do all they can to keep them coming.
"Yes, we're pretty down the rabbit hole on all this," says Pat
Flemming, who, for the past 20 years, has led the state's substance
abuse prevention program or directed Salt Lake County's efforts.
"We're at a crossroads. We're either going to keep at it as if it were
some kind of war or we're going to make some real headway. We're
starting to =97 the endmethnow campaign, for example =97 go in the right
direction.
"Compassion and treatment is the morally right and the much more
economically sensible thing to do," he said. "Continuing to turn
people into criminals has never worked and never will."
The status quotient
The status quo of the state health care system, as leaders of a new
statewide overhaul effort keep saying, cannot be sustained. In less
than 20 years, if something isn't done, the cost of paying for
insurance coverage will equal the average household income.
The status quo of drug policies and practices cannot be sustained
either, a range of people, from those conducting research on drug use
to drug runners, told the Deseret News.
A man who spent his career chasing drug dealers and users said current
policies have hurt much more than they have helped and, in the
process, have turned the United States into "incarceration nation" by
filling its prisons almost as fast as cars fill a new freeway.
Jack Cole, co-founder of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and a
retired lieutenant with the New Jersey state police narcotics squad,
said things have gotten past a joke, and it's way past time to wise
up.
"Despite all the lives we have destroyed =97 the trillions in tax
dollars and the 37 million arrests for nonviolent offenses =97 today
illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent and far easier to get than they
were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs," Cole said.
According to LEAP figures, more than 2.2 million U.S. citizens are
currently incarcerated because of drug-related crimes, and another 1.9
million are added every year replacing those who are paroled or pass
through the system.
"Meanwhile, people are getting run over by the system for small-time
dealing or using, the drug lords keep getting richer, the wheels of
justice keep grinding away," he said. "And the general public just
keeps getting more scared and just more willing to pay another $69
billion a year to feel better," he said. "This is the very definition
of a failed public policy. And doing the same thing over and over
expecting a different outcome is the very definition of madness."
Judges hearing drug cases say they are as overwhelmed as the poor
souls standing before their benches. Users say most of the time
they're as lost and more ashamed of themselves than any of their few
remaining loved ones and family members could be.
Drug counselors say despite their best efforts, users are as likely to
quit on their own because they've just gotten fed up with the
rigmarole of getting drugs, getting caught and getting out as they are
from therapy.
And most people =97 97 percent =97 who use cocaine and heroin say they
wouldn't if they were legalized, Cole said.
"What we're left with is a system that runs over people who can't
afford a good lawyer," he said. "It treats the affluent
anesthesiologist who gets caught with his controlled substance huffing
for fun a lot harsher than the poor guy caught for the same thing."
Beyond crazy
"We passed crazy a while ago," said a 41-year-old father in Box Elder
County who was recently reunited with his two children after spending
12 years in and out of jail and prison for being caught in 1997 with
two hits of LSD.
"It's complete looney-tunes out there," he told the Deseret News last
month. "What in the world are we trying to do? Whatever it is, it
ain't helping. That much I know for sure."
He said he got mixed up with drugs while in high school. He is quick
to point out he doesn't blame a rough childhood or abusive foster
parents, "but I knew I was different and had to do what I could to
make other kids like me." To that end, buying them candy in grade
school evolved into marijuana in high school.
"I had a lot of pain I was carrying around, and the drugs helped me
forget that," he said during a break from playing the video game "Rock
Band" with his son. His first jail stint was at 16 when he was
arrested with marijuana paraphernalia in his car.
"What I'd like people to know is I went to jail as a drug user and I
came out a criminal," he said. "It's almost like that's what they've
decided you are and what they expect you to be. And honestly, that's
how you start to convince yourself you are just some kind of super
loser who's never going to get right no matter how hard you try to
live by their program."
More often than not, he said, he diligently abided every condition of
his incarceration. And sometimes, he believes, a judge with no more
cause than having a bad day would find something wrong =97 a lack of
re****ting in or denying a re****t of a "dirty" urinalysis test =97 that
would tack on another three or nine months.
"I'm not looking to make excuses, but I've been through it so I know.
The system may get people off the streets, but it also turns a lot of
people against the world for some pretty minor stuff. Or worse, they
turn on themselves. Like the song says, 'I am what you say I am.' They
believe you're this bad guy, so you say to yourself, 'Well, that's
what I'll become."'
Worse than you think
The next evening and some 60 miles to the south, panels of experts and
a group of learned and dour listeners, gathered for a conference at
the University of Utah law school, are coming to a similar conclusion,
describing the current drug policy in academic terms: "incoherent,
unjust, gone awry, run amok."
At the conference, Joseph Califano, a former domestic adviser to two
U.S. presidents, is getting in the last word and coming very close to
flying off the handle:
"There is complicity to this scourge at every level in our society,"
said Califano, the former four-pack-a-day smoker who believes
Americans aren't necessarily crazy about drugs. "They're just high."
Not from ingesting alcohol, prescription and illegal drugs at 10 to 20
times the rate of any other developed country, "but from being
addicted to denying this enemy within =97 the number one killer and
crippler that will destroy us if we don't sober up."
"Whatever," said Alissa Stookey, a former heroin and meth addict.
"It's the same tired old scare tactics: Get people in an agitated,
highly suggestible state of mind, target 'the problem' out there,
guilt people for not seeing it or doing enough to stop it, then sell
them on an idea or product that ultimately provides a sense of
security. Thing is, it's all just phantom comfort."
In the process, she and other users told the newspaper, drugs become
an enemy so powerful that everything starts to feed off it: Getting
high becomes an ever more serious crime, law enforcement gets bigger
budgets, more people get busted, more of them go to jail, more jails
get built, and next thing you know, drugs are the leading cause of
nearly every societal ill.
"Nothing changes, except that people cower and frown and tell each
other, 'Oh, it's just so terrible that so-and-so's son overdosed or so-
and-so's daughter is in jail. Drugs, oh they're just so awful.' And
that's as far as the discussion goes," Stookey said.
Drugs do cause a lot of tragedy, she and the three dozen illegal and
legal substance users and abusers interviewed for this story agree.
But blaming drugs for society's ills just ensures the epidemic will
continue =97 and so will the shoring up of funding streams for the
courts and government agencies assigned to deal with the problem, they
say.
Every product advertisement or public education campaign on any
product or service, be it hamburgers or drug rehab, is based on three
overriding human emotions, Stookey said. They are fear, uncertainty
and doubt. So common is that human state of being that advertising
agencies use the FUD acronym in campaigns. "Hit any of those three
states of mind, and you've hit your target." [...]
|
