THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 4, 1995 TAG: 9502030058
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
CBS recently devoted three prime-time hours to violence - gang shootings, child abuse, urban craziness, stalkings. But all across America and running through all kinds of crimes committed by all kinds of people there was a single monotonous theme - drug and alcohol abuse.
Writing in The New York Times Magazine, former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joe Califano recently made a similar point. Scratch the surface of the problems that most trouble Americans - including crime, welfare dependency, poverty, teen pregnancy, disruption in the schools - and you find substance abuse. The title of Califano's article is: ``It's Drugs, Stupid.''
He says we're doing too little to fight against them despite a much-publicized war. Yet drugs add $75 billion a year to the nation's health-care bill and figure in most violent crimes. Drug and alcohol abusers swamp the criminal-justice system and fill the prisons to overflowing.
Califano admits treatment is often unsuccessful. Only 25 percent of those who need it enter abuse programs. Only one-eighth are drug-free a year later. Yet a California study suggests that, even with so high a failure rate, for every $1 spent on treatment, $7 are saved in crime, health and welfare costs.
What is to be done? Califano proposes we aim at forcing more people into treatment and making them stay with it. He admits freely that abusers need plenty of carrots and sticks to prevent backsliding. Among his suggestions:
Make federal grants to both state and federal prisons contingent upon the availability of drug and alcohol treatment. It makes no sense to incarcerate addicts only to allow them to serve their sentences as substance abusers and leave prison no better off than when they entered it.
Keep inmates in jail, boot camps or halfway houses until they have demonstrated a year of sobriety.
Require attendance at AA or other such support programs for addicts granted parole or probation.
Refuse welfare to addicts who aren't receiving treatment.
Put the children of welfare recipients who are drug and alcohol abusers in foster care or orphanages until their parents clean up their act.
Check on progress with random drug testing for addicts who are on parole or receiving welfare.
The supply-side war on drugs has not been a success and the social costs of failure have been immense. A demand-side war on addicts is overdue, one that punishes continued addiction and rewards abstinence. It would cost money to make treatment more widely available, but can we really afford the crime, welfare dependency, health problems and social costs that addiction now imposes on the nation? by CNB