CHANGING TACTICS IN WAR ON DRUGS

A proposal by a state House member 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 our state have entire vice units primarily dedicated to
sniffing out drugs and 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.