TURNING TO TREATMENT, NOT PUNISHMENT

Opium, morphine, heroin.

Coca, cocaine, crack.

Speed, methamphetamine, and now, more potent forms of meth.

As researcher and drug historian Bill White has been saying for
years, the history of drug abuse in America is a history of
ever-evolving drugs and an ever-quickening pace of drug ingestion.
The drugs get stronger, the route to "high" gets faster. Sniff it,
snort it, smoke it, shoot it.

In that vein, the quest to use drugs has yielded far more innovations
than the politics of protecting us from drug abuse - and drug abusers
from themselves. The next new crack/meth scourge is already making
its way from science labs to the streets (and athletic fields).

If only our public policies regarding drug abuse were as creative as
our penchant for quicker, more powerful modes of drug use. But that
is where we get stuck in one mode. Over and over again.

The country's first narcotics law, passed in San Francisco in 1875,
targeted Chinese immigrants, who became the scapegoats in a national
drive to ban opium. In the 1900s, anti-cocaine laws targeted Southern
blacks, though there was almost no evidence of cocaine use among
African-Americans at the time. Early laws criminalizing heroin were
aimed at European immigrants, mainly second-generation Irish. And the
marijuana laws of the 1930s marked Mexican immigrants. Time and
again, American prejudices have swayed American policies on drug
abuse and treatment.

So it went when crack hit black neighborhoods and cocaine hit Wall
Street in the 1980s. So it's going as meth makes its way from rural
outposts to suburbs and cities. The pendulum swings too far to the
right and hits, say, Rush Limbaugh. Large numbers of affluent - code
word: white - people get mixed up with the law over drug abuse, then
drug policies shift from the criminal justice system to treatment and
recovery programs.

A five-day series on drug treatment and recovery ended in this
newspaper on Monday. "Silent Treatment: Addiction in America" is
notable because it's national in scope and unapologetic in its
attempt to advocate for more drug treatment instead of tougher drug
laws. It shines a light, unabashedly, on the strength it takes to
recover instead of the deviancy it takes to abuse.

Perhaps more notably, crime is a minor theme of the series. And that
is one more signal that the severely flawed, so-called war on drugs
is whimpering to an end.

No one has announced an official exit strategy, no one's calling for
victory celebrations. But renewed emphasis on drug treatment is
apparent in the war's infrastructure. States have pulled back from
the prison-building booms that fueled so much rural economic growth -
and inner-city despair - beginning in the 1980s. Financial
practicalities are forcing legislators to recognize, finally, that
incarceration is about as much of a solution for modern drug
epidemics as Prohibition was for alcohol.

Like Prohibition, the 1920s version of zero tolerance, the so-called
war on drugs overwhelmed social networks in ways unexpected and
unpredictable. And, just as states have pulled back from building
prisons, courts have embraced drug treatment programs, through drug courts.

"Silent Treatment," the series, follows one drug abuser after another
through recovery. "By me using drugs, I caused someone else to use
drugs. I gloried in it, I sanctioned in it," said George Moorman, a
54-year-old recovering crack addict who recently earned a doctoral
degree in educational psychology. "I had to go back and clean up what
I messed up."

Moorman, like many recovering drug abusers, came to recognize his
personal responsibilities - but not without support from systems that
realized effective public responsibilities.