Is it better to put CHEMICALLY addicts in prison for possession or rehab? Drug addiction is a disease. drug abuse is a disease. Logically, the purchase, possession and abuse of drugs by an addict is as much a health issue because it is a legal question.
drug abuse is undoubtedly a crime more emotionally complex than other non-violent offenses such as theft and vandalism, but initial attempts to fight against the abuse was not the extent necessary to obtain addicts clean. Incarceration is not an effective method to free drug users from the substances which they depend.
You still can not beat an animal into submission, and the national "war on drugs", as presently framed, is trying to do. It aims to prevent drug abuse and crime by application of strict penalties for covered citizens who break.
Although national policies on the status of drug prohibition objective is to promote public health, more funding, both nationally and locally, is allocated to investigation and prosecution of drug users than to the education and rehabilitation.
Methods unsuccessful brute-force established at the federal level are also standard at the local level. The LAPD made 26,131 arrests for violent crimes and property services in 2003, according to a statistical report published by the chief of police.
The same year, the LAPD made 27,486 narcotics arrests. In short, police arrested 1,300 people from over violations of narcotics for the murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults and larcenies combined.
Despite numerous arrests for drug crimes defined in 2003, the effects of the arrest had on the use has been negligible. The U.S. Department of Health and Social Services, the number of adult users and abusers remained in a flat line.
Crime statistics show that the harsh sentences for convictions of nonviolent drug possession is ineffective to deter recidivism, but further analysis reveals that imprisonment for first offenses could increase the doubt for a second offense. Relapse rates are more than 70 percent of all forms of criminal justice interventions and approaches that focus only on corrections, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
California has taken a step in the right direction in November 2000 when it passed the proposal 36 - the initiative that allows people to first and second time drug possession convictions to receive drug treatment instead of incarceration - but funding issues and have prevented the implementation of the proposal to be successful.
Officials of the District Attorney's office told the LA Weekly they expected patients in the primary part of rehabilitation programs for recreation - not full-fledged addiction. The money allocated to fund rehabilitation programs and medical care is inadequate for the more typical, heavily dependent on people who need more frequent, more costly treatment in residential facilities instead of the outpatient program in 12 steps .
Recent reductions in state and county have been devastating to the already strained programs made possible by Prop. 36. To complicate matters further, the sheer size of the county coupled with the lack of money is a good control program almost impossible to assess.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the effective treatment of addiction to combine the necessary medical assistance and social services necessary for the individual dependence back on track. Prop. 36 has made progress in providing Californians in need with a chance at freedom Chemical restored, but more well-funded social programs such as employment services, access to medical care and mental health facilities health treatment and counseling, the success of the legislation is extr.
Posted on March 27, 2010.
