DRUG POLICY SHOULD FOCUS ON HELPING ADDICTS, NOT JAILING THEM

Two years ago, my 23-year-old brother became addicted to painkillers
after breaking his leg and undergoing several operations to repair
it.

Last year, while he was checking into rehab for abusing OxyContin, I
was drafting a chapter in my new book calling for drug legalization.
It was a difficult moment to believe in individual liberty: I felt
firsthand the effects of what it's like when people make bad
decisions. I saw how hard my brother struggled to get clean, first
moving forward and then backsliding again into substance abuse.

One of the more compelling arguments for the war on drugs is that if
we allow people to freely buy and use all sorts of currently illegal
drugs, some people will end up becoming addicted when they otherwise
would have been deterred by criminal penalties.

This, however, is a false choice: It ignores the fact that many people
are - as my brother was before treatment - already addicted to harmful
substances. Local, state and federal governments directly spend more
than $40 billion a year on what's typically called the war on drugs.

Virtually all of that money is spent on trying to interdict drugs as
they enter the country or arresting drug users and drug sellers. Our
current aim of preventing people from becoming addicted to harmful
substances misses the mark.

A better focus - and one that would eliminate the violence and crime
associated with black markets and reduce the social harms of addiction
- - would be to ask: What's the best way we can encourage people who
have drug problems to seek treatment?

Baltimore has been a prime example of how successful we can be when we
stop worrying about drug abuse and start worrying about drug abusers.

In 1999, Baltimore and the Maryland General Assembly began a
partnership to substantially increase investment in drug treatment
rather than on incarceration. The Baltimore Drug and Alcohol Treatment
Outcomes Study, released in 2002 by the Open Society Institute as the
largest and most rigorously conducted drug treatment outcomes study
focusing on a single city, compared the experience of addicts the year
before and the year after treatment.

One year after treatment, there was a 69 percent reduction in heroin
use, a 48 percent reduction in cocaine use and a 38 percent reduction
in imprisonment.

For my brother, our current drug control regime did little to keep him
from making bad decisions. But what it did do is make it harder for
him to seek treatment. This is one of the unintended consequences of
today's drug policy. Not only does an addict have to admit that he has
a problem, but he also has to admit that he's a criminal. This puts
people in an emotional double jeopardy. It's hard enough to admit that
what you're doing is self-destructive and harmful, but it's even
harder to admit that your actions are punishable with prison and
considered morally wrong.

It can be difficult to watch someone you love destroy himself, but the
hard thing about valuing liberty is accepting the fact that people
make bad decisions. It was easier, this time, to accept my brother's
drug addiction because I know that he's learning from his mistakes.

Only those who know what it's like to be hooked on a drug can really
appreciate what it is like to be free of it. It may have taken several
bad decisions and two rounds of rehab, but today my brother knows more
about personal responsibility than anyone could ever have taught him
in a classroom.

If we had a drug policy that focused more on helping substance abusers
and less on arresting them, perhaps he could have reached this point
sooner.

Taylor W. Buley holds the Burton C. Gray memorial internship at Reason
magazine and is the author of "The Fresh Politics Reader: Making Current
Events and Public Affairs Relevant for Young Americans