Pubdate: Mon, 09 Aug 1999
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 1999 The Denver Post
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Author: Robert F. Hickey
Note: Robert F. Hickey is president and CEO of Innovative Strategies Inc.,
a national behavioral health management firm. He resides in Edwards, CO.

OUR EFFORTS HAVE FAILED MISERABLY

We have spent almost $1 trillion since 1971 fighting the "war on drugs." We
have killed innocent people, raided unsuspecting families, built dozens of
prisons, confiscated billions of dollars of property, violated the
constitution, sacrificed our civil liberties and, through it all, accepted
the lies of those with a vested interest in perpetuating this nonsense.

Now we are allowing our government to throw $1 billion more - plus $1
billion from the private sector - into the fray through a national
advertising campaign to eliminate substance abuse.

Consider what the "war on drugs" already has achieved.

We have about one prison guard per three prisoners versus one teacher per
30 students. We spend $4,000 a year to educate one student; $30,000 a year
to house one inmate.

As a direct consequence of the "war on drugs," one of nine school-age
children has one or both parents in prison. One in three black men under
age 25 is in prison or some form of supervised release.

Our prisons hold more than 1.7 million human beings. Sixty-five percent of
federal prisoners are there on nonviolent, drug-related convictions.

Meanwhile, another 1.7 million Americans await treatment for some disorder
related to substance abuse - but no money is being offered to help them.

In "Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents," Mike Males writes:
"It's time to recognize that drug use was going down when the drug war
started, and it's gone up since. This is what's been tried for 10 years.
It's politicians spending money for self-aggrandizement."

And now comes the government's $2 billion ad campaign.

For any dialogue to succeed with teenagers, it must be honest. That
ingredient has been absent from all our efforts. Succeeding generations
learn to discount our messages at an early age because we have been so
disingenuous in our moral pronouncements about human behavior. We preach
the absolutes, that all drug use leads to death, psychosis or jail.
Clearly, jail is closest to being an absolute in the United States for drug
abusers.

Even those of us too young to have seen "Reefer Madness" in the '30s have
heard about the bizarre distortions on truth in that film. The latest $2
billion campaign is merely the new edition of "Reefer Madness." The one
constant through such efforts since Prohibition has been the lack of
truthfulness.

The new ad campaign continues the attempt to make the exception the rule.
All outcomes ascribed to substance abuse in these so-called public service
announcements illustrate the most unlikely results.

One ad shows a pretty young woman in a take-off of the old "This is your
brain on drugs" routine. In this rendition, she destroys a kitchen with a
frying pan in a psychotic rampage supposedly brought on by drug use. Not a
specific type of drug, mind you, just any drug.

Likewise, DARE fails because children are impressionable and accept
everything the officer tells them in fourth through sixth grades. When
these children get to high school, 99.5 percent haven't witnessed any of
the drastic outcomes threatened by the officers. Almost all of them will
experiment with risky behaviors, and a minuscule percentage will become
casualties of that experimentation. The outcomes described by the DARE
officers are the exception. So students lack respect for law enforcement
and distrust all prevention efforts.

This new ad campaign fails to prepare young people for the consequences
they can expect from their normal, adolescent, risk-taking behavior.

In addition, the goals of the ad campaign are poorly defined. What are the
anticipated outcomes? Does this effort provide any direction for people
already caught up in destructive behavior?

Just as politicians, law enforcement and hordes of prosecutors have spent
$1 trillion under the guise of a war on drugs, the only segment of society
gaining from this ad campaign are the television, radio and newspaper
outlets and their agencies, to the tune of $625 million.

The campaign is a veiled effort to promulgate a flawed political ideology,
one that has mired us for decades in the same erroneous propaganda.

And it may cause more harm than good. Said Marc Mauer, assistant director
of the Sentencing Project, "There are real questions about whether this ad
campaign is based on the best research and might not be counterproductive."

In reality, our society always has had drug abusers. It always will. We
would be much better off acknowledging that history and dealing with it in
an effective manner.

We glamorize drug use in all forms of media. Our tax dollars subsidize
tobacco cultivation. Millions are spent annually to wine and dine our
legislators to protect the liquor industry. Yet our political ideology
discourages and, in many cases, bars harm-reduction efforts.

If we are to abate substance abuse, efforts must be refocused in that
direction.

Consider the words of Lee N. Robins, Ph.D., professor of social science in
psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, as
spoken at a meeting this summer of the American Society of Addiction Medicine:

"Because substance abuse often remits in early adulthood - usually five
years after it starts - a vital part of our job is harm reduction. We need
to keep people as safe as possible - from jail, driving, overdoses, etc. We
also need more information about the course of a disorder - e.g., which
heavy users will continue to have problems. This is the most crucial area
of study."

An audience member said, "Science must replace ideology as the foundation
for drug abuse addiction prevention, treatment and policy strategies."

How could we better deal with substance abuse if we redirected that $1
billion? Could we reduce the student/teacher ratio in classrooms? How about
more after-school activities? More remedial reading teachers? More school
counselors? How about peer counseling panels? How about strategies that
help youths understand the perils of the behavior with which they all will
struggle? How about putting politics aside and young people and their
families first?

We have turned out on the streets hundreds of thousands of people with
mental illnesses who cannot get treatment. With realistic budgets, our
community mental health centers could play a significant role in
ameliorating these problems.

Columbia University research has documented that education and treatment
are seven times more cost-effective than arrest and incarceration for
substance abuse, yet we continue to spend more tax dollars on prisons than
on treatment.

We should promote educational efforts to inform substance abusers and users
as to problems they are likely to encounter.

We need community resource centers where people can turn when they're in
trouble. Who would you call if your child became a casualty of
experimentation? The police or a local public or mental health clinic? Do
you want your child to receive help or contend with a conviction the rest
of his or her life?

Needle exchange programs have proven effective in reducing the spread of
AIDS. And such efforts bring addicts to a resource where help is available
when they choose to change their life direction.

We have a network of care-givers in place. Instead of wasting money on
propaganda, let us increase funds for those agencies. Let us promote needle
exchange. Let us integrate all funding streams into a seamless system of
treatment and prevention across our country.

Let us take the billions we are wasting on propaganda, a judicial system
exploding with otherwise unemployable lawyers, and a prison industry
tripping over itself to expand and address the problems of drug abuse in a
responsible and effective manner.

This new campaign represents a classic example of the government throwing
money at a problem for political gain. There is no rhyme or reason for this
monumental and tragic waste of taxpayer dollars. 
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