CHANGING TACTICS

Recovery Programs Crucial To Winning Drug War

Think about the families fractured this holiday because of drug abuse.

Some missing family members are in prison; some are dead. Some may be
around the house, but not really present.

No one thinks drug abuse is OK. The question is how best to fight
it.

There are signs that the answer is shifting toward fighting drug
abuse one person at a time, helping users recover, preventing others
from getting hooked.

It's slow, it's personal, it's expensive. But without it, history and
economics say, we are doomed to failure.

Enforcement agencies and the general public have developed a sort of
addiction to the quick fix of drug raids.

Often conducted in the early morning with an eager media on hand, the
raids provide gratifying images of disheveled accused dealers and
users -- hands bound, disappearing into squad cars or
courthouses.

We've seen them over and over, each time enjoying the temporary high
of feeling like a problem has been solved. But the frequency tells us
it's not working.

Operation UNITE -- Eastern Kentucky's largest anti-drug program,
which operate in 29 counties and has a budget of more than $9 million
- -- says that in less than two years it conducted 49 drug roundups,
arrested 1,372 people and removed or seized drugs with a street value
of almost $5.8 million.

But that's not working.

"We tried for the past 50 years to arrest our way out of this
problem, but it did not, has not and will not work," Dan Smoot, head
of UNITE's law enforcement division, recently told The Associated
Press, explaining why the focus and budget are shifting from
enforcement to prevention.

In the cold terms of economics, this shift acknowledges that supply
will always follow demand. If people are willing to destroy their
lives to get the money to buy drugs, the market will find drugs to
sell them.

The remarkable and hopeful news is that it is possible for drug users
to stop. Comprehensive drug treatment programs work.

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse,
told a congressional committee this year that in a Delaware study, 70
percent of inmates who participated in prison-based drug treatment
and who continued working with a treatment group after release
remained arrest-free after three years.

Other research has shown that on average, people struggling with drug
addictions work harder to get well and stay well than people with
other chronic diseases, such as diabetes or hypertension.

It may not be a trend, but there are signs, in addition to UNITE's
announcement, that Kentucky is moving toward an approach that offers
some hope of stopping the cycle of abuse rather than just
interrupting it.

UNITE also has dedicated resources toward prevention: placing
substance-abuse counselors in schools to identify students who are at
risk and to help them avoid addiction; providing incentives to school
districts to develop research-based approaches to drug abuse
prevention; and engaging students in leading programs.

Even with these initiatives, though, UNITE still has more money ($3.1
million this year) allocated to enforcement than to education ($2.4
million) or to treatment ($2.7 million.)

This fall, Gov. Ernie Fletcher announced plans to build 10
residential treatment centers around the state, each capable of
treating about 100 adults at a time.

In Lexington this month, the first four women graduated from an
intensive four-month recovery program begun this year at the Fayette
County Detention Center.

That's all good, but it's not enough. Each drug abuser is at the
center of an ever-widening arc of family, friends, neighbors,
co-workers, crime victims and even taxpayers who suffer because of
the addiction.

Enforcement will always be and must be an important part of the
picture. Law-abiding people need to know they are safe; drug dealers
need to know they aren't.

But the fractured lives and families will have a chance to become
whole only through treatment. We've got to wean ourselves from the
quick fix of drug busts and commit to destroying drug abuse at its
source.