For the week of July 18 - July 24, 2001

Once again, California leads the way

Commentary by DICK DORWORTH

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… the condition, drug use and abuse, is a medical problem, not a criminal one; and treatment is less expensive than the cost of the new prisons and jails …

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Once again, California leads the way. Whether it’s the outlook that led to the phrase "California or bust," or the sentiment that less than 150 years later coined "Don’t Californicate….(fill in the place)," it so often captures the imagination and leads the nation in certain aspects of social movements, political shifts, community awareness and human consciousness. The state seems to become cognizant of or at least to manifest the state of things long before other states catch on. Maybe it’s the weather or the water, the wine or the effects of traffic gridlock. Perhaps it’s just acknowledging the implications of its state animal and symbol, the grizzly bear, being extinct in California. But now it’s ahead of the rest of the nation once again. The nation’s biggest experiment in drug rehabilitation began July 1 in California. Proposition 36, passed last fall by California voters, requires that nonviolent drug users, convicted for use or possession for the first or second time, receive treatment instead of incarceration in jail or prison.

California has thus legally recognized several aspects of the living reality of the drug "problem" in America: treatment of the condition is more effective (as well as intelligent, humane, compassionate and practical) than punishment for it; the condition, drug use and abuse, is a medical problem, not a criminal one; and treatment is less expensive than the cost of the new prisons and jails needed to lock up drug offenders and keep them there for extensive stays.

Twenty years ago when the politically motivated "war on drugs" really heated up, California led the nation then in locking up drug offenders. Until now it has locked up more drug offenders per capita than any other state, at 115 people per 100,000 population. This means that California has been locking up an estimated 36,000 nonviolent people a year who have been busted for possessing illicit substances. It costs a lot of money and takes a harsh toll on society to make criminals out of people who are not criminals. It is very foolish for a society to treat its non-criminal citizens as if they were both criminal and the enemy. And it doesn’t work. The voters of California have had the courage and good sense to face such foolishness, to end it and to move beyond it. The rest of the country and the world would do well to pay attention to this small step in a good direction.

The treatment mandated by Proposition 36 ranges from simple counseling to time in a rehabilitation center. Drug offenders who want to stay out of jail will be required to enter a conditional guilty plea. They will then be supervised during treatment and their records will be cleared if they complete treatment. In some California counties, people in treatment are tested as many as six times a week. This is the root of one of the major debates about and criticisms of the measure---that the testing costs too much and there is no money set aside for it. But the cost of treatment and testing is minuscule compared to the money being spent in the "war on drugs." Since George Bush became President the federal expenditure on this war has jumped from $6.7 billion to $12 billion. The states are spending another $40 billion a year on this endless war that can never be won. These figures do not include the money the United States is spending on military aid to countries like Columbia and Peru under the guise of combating the war on drugs. Nor does it include the money spent to build and maintain new prison facilities to accommodate nonviolent drug users. Nor does it include the economic and human cost to the families of people locked away like criminals for non criminal behavior.

If the United States put $60 billion into its tattered public education system and into treatment for drug abuse instead of into war, it would actually address the problem of drugs in America as the war on drugs does not and cannot.

More education and treatment might bring to the surface the hidden but very real social costs caused by the hypocrisy of the war on drugs as seen in the following factoids: each year in America about 150,000 people die from alcohol; each year about 450,000 die because of tobacco; each year about 100,000 die from legal prescription drugs; each year about 3,000 die from heroin and cocaine combined; and each year approximately 0 die from the effects of marijuana. If the war on drugs was about protecting the citizens of America from the consequences of drug abuse, then that war would rightly be focused on tobacco and alcohol. That is not going to happen (nor should it), but it casts an interesting light on, and calls into question, what the war on drugs is really about.

In a hundred years the war on drugs will be properly viewed in the same regard as most (but certainly not all) informed people view America’s shameful witch trials in Salem and Europe’s more extensive but equally nefarious witch hunts a few centuries ago. While burning witches alive is certainly less expensive than waging war, they are of a kind. They are rooted in superstition and ignorance and fear, carried out in violence to both individual and society, and maintained by an insanity in high (and low) places.

With Proposition 36 California, once again, leads the way.

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