Since the early 1970s, the U.S. has spent $1 trillion in a war on drugs. Yet, illegal drugs are cheaper and more widely available than ever. Nearly 10 percent of Americans used illegal drugs last year.
Domestic consumption exceeds $100 billion, and crime, lost productivity and related health care cost us almost $200 billion annually. Last year in New Hampshire, 433 people died from opioid overdoses, three times our traffic fatalities.
U.S. taxpayers have spent over $8 billion attempting to eradicate opium production in Afghanistan, yet cultivation there has reached record levels, supplying three-quarters of global demand and providing a major source of funding for the Taliban.
In a stunning admission of this failure, all inmates and all law enforcers I met during a visit to the Cheshire County jail told me that the current prosecution and incarceration approach is nothing more than an expensive revolving door.
Inmates leave jail more addicted and with a bigger drug supply network than when they arrive.
As with so many of our pressing and long-unresolved national challenges, we need to open up to new approaches so that we can do much more with fewer taxpayer dollars. It’s time to face down controversy and engage in a thorough, evidence-based drug policy rethink.
About one-third of us inherit brains wired for proneness to addiction. Serious life stresses — such as childhood physical, sexual or psychological abuse, deaths, violence, addiction or family breakdown involving an adult family member, and major emotional blows at any time of life — are triggers that can turn proneness into self-medication with drugs or alcohol, and then to addiction. Over the past year, about 5 percent of Americans suffered a substance addiction.
Once an individual becomes psychologically dependent on an opioid, stimulant or alcohol, the addiction usually becomes part of the brain chemistry for a lifetime. Clean addicts I met in the Cheshire County jail floored me when they told me that they cannot stop their nightly dreams about getting a heroin needle back into their arms. Addiction is not a failure of willpower. Even arrest, prison, loss of career, family and dignity are not enough to stop it.
For heroin and the other “hard” drugs, we can learn from the eight European nations and Canada that have shifted taxpayer funding from drug use prosecution and incarceration to drug-assisted treatment programs. Using this policy, Switzerland has reduced drug-overdose deaths to a rate one-twentieth of New Hampshire’s.
Additional economic and quality of life benefits include reductions in drug-related property crimes, illegal drug use, disease, and major increases in addiction treatment retention. In Switzerland, property crimes among enrolled heroin addicts dropped by 90 percent.
Opioid addiction cannot be cured, but can be effectively managed with a seamless bundle of services that remain available to the addict for years or even a lifetime. These services can include a maintenance dose of opioid receptor blocking drugs like Suboxone or Vivitrol administered in clinics in combination with drug abuse tests and mental health and life counseling.
For those exiting prison with criminal records and little to no money, these programs must include assistance with job counseling, transitional housing and transportation. Notable success has also been seen in a program of detox, then abstinence combined with instantly available 24/7 support from a trained and trusted coach.
These programs must be made available to drug addicts immediately and on demand and when offenders exit jail or prison. While addicts are usually drug free on release, their addiction remains as powerful as when they were arrested and most will relapse immediately if wait times for services are longer than even minutes.
In New Hampshire, this program bundle would cost very roughly $500 per month per addict — far less than the costs of prosecution, incarceration, property crimes, disease, income loss and welfare services for children.
For marijuana, like alcohol, Congress should grant states their power under the 10th Amendment to legalize, regulate and tax it as each state may see fit. We need to admit that prohibition has failed.
I’ve been told by a recent graduate that at my local high school in Hanover, marijuana can be had free for the asking every day and is far easier to obtain than alcohol.
States opting to legalize should consider requiring child-proof packaging and labels disclosing potency and health effects, including the fact that marijuana use involves performance and brain developmental effects (though far less in the aggregate than tobacco or alcohol). States legalizing should also ban advertising and public use, license in-state producers, allow personal production in limited quantities, and extend DUI laws to cover marijuana metabolite blood levels.
Washington State is one of four to have legalized and taxed the sale of cannabis products. Over its first year in full effect, Washington saved most of the $20 million previously spent on marijuana law enforcement and collected $83 million in tax revenues, with revenues used to fund prevention, treatment, research and education programs.
Early data show that traffic fatalities and youth marijuana use have not increased. Studies in medical marijuana states show no gateway drug effect, with no increase in use of hard drugs by either adults or youth.
Present addiction treatment programs are fragmented and poorly funded. Only one in ten Americans who could benefit even attempts to access existing programs. States wishing to legalize and tax marijuana could use the proceeds to increase funding for addiction treatment.
New Hampshire is making the mistake of funding still-insufficiently expanded treatment programs using Obamacare Medicaid dollars, a source highly likely to evaporate given already perilous federal debt levels.
Jim Rubens, of Hanover, has written a book on addiction, was past president of Headrest, a Lebanon-based substance abuse counseling center, and is a Republican running for U.S. Senate.
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