Pubdate: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 Source: Peoria Journal Star (IL) Copyright: 2006sPeoria Journal Star Contact: http://pjstar.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/338 Note: Does not publish letters from outside our circulation area. Author: Pam Adams Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?159 (Drug Courts) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment) TURNING TO TREATMENT, NOT PUNISHMENT Opium, morphine, heroin. Coca, cocaine, crack. Speed, methamphetamine, and now, more potent forms of meth. As researcher and drug historian Bill White has been saying for years, the history of drug abuse in America is a history of ever-evolving drugs and an ever-quickening pace of drug ingestion. The drugs get stronger, the route to "high" gets faster. Sniff it, snort it, smoke it, shoot it. In that vein, the quest to use drugs has yielded far more innovations than the politics of protecting us from drug abuse - and drug abusers from themselves. The next new crack/meth scourge is already making its way from science labs to the streets (and athletic fields). If only our public policies regarding drug abuse were as creative as our penchant for quicker, more powerful modes of drug use. But that is where we get stuck in one mode. Over and over again. The country's first narcotics law, passed in San Francisco in 1875, targeted Chinese immigrants, who became the scapegoats in a national drive to ban opium. In the 1900s, anti-cocaine laws targeted Southern blacks, though there was almost no evidence of cocaine use among African-Americans at the time. Early laws criminalizing heroin were aimed at European immigrants, mainly second-generation Irish. And the marijuana laws of the 1930s marked Mexican immigrants. Time and again, American prejudices have swayed American policies on drug abuse and treatment. So it went when crack hit black neighborhoods and cocaine hit Wall Street in the 1980s. So it's going as meth makes its way from rural outposts to suburbs and cities. The pendulum swings too far to the right and hits, say, Rush Limbaugh. Large numbers of affluent - code word: white - people get mixed up with the law over drug abuse, then drug policies shift from the criminal justice system to treatment and recovery programs. A five-day series on drug treatment and recovery ended in this newspaper on Monday. "Silent Treatment: Addiction in America" is notable because it's national in scope and unapologetic in its attempt to advocate for more drug treatment instead of tougher drug laws. It shines a light, unabashedly, on the strength it takes to recover instead of the deviancy it takes to abuse. Perhaps more notably, crime is a minor theme of the series. And that is one more signal that the severely flawed, so-called war on drugs is whimpering to an end. No one has announced an official exit strategy, no one's calling for victory celebrations. But renewed emphasis on drug treatment is apparent in the war's infrastructure. States have pulled back from the prison-building booms that fueled so much rural economic growth - and inner-city despair - beginning in the 1980s. Financial practicalities are forcing legislators to recognize, finally, that incarceration is about as much of a solution for modern drug epidemics as Prohibition was for alcohol. Like Prohibition, the 1920s version of zero tolerance, the so-called war on drugs overwhelmed social networks in ways unexpected and unpredictable. And, just as states have pulled back from building prisons, courts have embraced drug treatment programs, through drug courts. "Silent Treatment," the series, follows one drug abuser after another through recovery. "By me using drugs, I caused someone else to use drugs. I gloried in it, I sanctioned in it," said George Moorman, a 54-year-old recovering crack addict who recently earned a doctoral degree in educational psychology. "I had to go back and clean up what I messed up." Moorman, like many recovering drug abusers, came to recognize his personal responsibilities - but not without support from systems that realized effective public responsibilities.