WAR ON DRUGS MAY BE BETTER FOUGHT BY AIMING AT ABUSE

A proposal by an Alamance County state representative should give us
all cause to take a hard look at America's war on drugs. The state
legislator, Rep. Alice Bordsen, D-Alamance, is suggesting that
non-violent youthful offenders who have committed felonies be given an
opportunity to have their charges reduced to a misdemeanor or expunged
once they've completed their sentence.

Bordsen plans to introduce a bill to that effect when the General
Assembly comes back into session in January.

While the debate is over how to have teenagers who have a brush with
the law get back on the right track, perhaps we should also look at
how we approach the problem with drugs in our society.

Should we continue to focus on drugs in our society as primarily a
legal problem or should we look at it as a health problem? To say it
another way: Should we continue to put people who use or sell drugs in
prison or on parole? Or should we try to prevent drug abuse in the
first place and help those who abuse drugs get off of them? Focusing
on the legal aspect of the drug war is costing immense amounts of
taxpayer dollars. Of the 36,401 people in North Carolina prisons,
5,098 are listed on the Department of Correction Web page as being
inmates because of drug convictions. Thousands more are on probation.

Police across out state have entire vice units primarily dedicated to
sniffing out drugs and apprehending those who sell them and use them.
Such efforts are costly and time consuming, not to mention the burden
that drug cases place on our court system.

Wouldn't it be better if we focused on keeping people in our state
from abusing drugs?

Treatment for drug abuse and addiction is expensive too, but not as
expensive as hiring corrections officers to guard offenders in our
prisons. Yet this is not a request for more state money to be thrown
into drug treatment. Instead, it's an appeal for families to encourage
their children not to abuse drugs, for friends to help friends in a
time of need, for churches and other religious organizations to get
involved in the lives of their members so that they don't see a need
to abuse drugs. And it's a desire for businesses and non-profit groups
to encourage their employees and neighbors to not abuse drugs.

Bordsen has offered an interesting proposal for helping youthful
offenders get their lives back on track. Ironically enough, her idea
grew out of an undercover drug bust that resulted in the arrest of
about four-dozen teenagers in the Alamance-Burlington Schools.

Drug abuse can destroy lives. Yet our efforts to win the war on drugs
by throwing those involved in its sale or abuse in prison hasn't
worked. It's time to consider focusing our fight to get rid of drug
abuse on the front end rather than through the legal system.