DRUG TREATMENT IS VERY HARD WORK

I can't envision drugs being legal. What would be the purpose of
going to treatment then?

In treatment, counselors teach people how to get and stay off drugs
and to find a better way to live. If you are talking about legalizing
drugs and sending people to treatment, how are you not condoning the
very thing you are against?

Even if drugs can be gotten legally, there is always going to be some
knucklehead who's not going to wait to go through a program to get
his drugs. As with everything else, somebody will always try to get
around whatever is legal.

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Also, understand that some people don't try drug treatment because
they think they have to go to jail first. Although that's not true,
something has to be done about that fear.

If drugs are made legal, there will have to be incentive for going.
Treatment will have to be made mandatory and available to everyone --
in the way I went through treatment.

I got sick 15 years ago and ended up in Wilmington Hospital. The
emergency room doctor identified that I had a problem with drugs. He
called Brandywine Counseling Center.

Right away, a guy was sent over. It turned out he was somebody I had
met in prison. I was not ready to stop using drugs, but I was ready
to stop all the pain and agony that goes along with using drugs. I
was a heroin addict from way back, so I was on the methadone program.

Legalization could work like the methadone program: You have to go to
treatment in order to get it.

The man took me to Brandywine Counseling Center from the hospital and
I was assigned to a woman there. She was new to the job. She had been
a hard-core drug addict like me. She shared her life story and how
she was making it. That sounded interesting to me -- to try to live
normal again. She took me to my first 12-step meeting.

I started going to the meetings and daily individual counseling. I
also had to go to group meetings, to get counseling with other
addicts. I did all of this every day. It was intense, but I started
to see myself differently. I began to think that maybe I could get
back to being the person my mother raised me to be.

It takes all three of those elements to make a difference --
individual counseling, group counseling and 12-step meetings, all at
the same time.

Now I work as a leader in a program that has the worst clients of
all. But everybody on my caseload is clean because of those three things.

If drug legalization is to work, people will have to be made to
realize that they have to change their lives.

Stephen Burns, of Wilmington, is a counselor and employment
specialist for the Brandywine Counseling Center.