A BETTER WEAPON

Fund, Expand Drug Treatment Program

When Lt. Gov. Steve Pence says that "we cannot and will not incarcerate our
way out of this drug problem," people should sit up and listen.

A former federal prosecutor, Pence has spent the better part of a year
leading a search for answers to Kentucky's drug abuse crisis.

Any effective solution, he says, will require a greater commitment to
education, demand-reduction and treatment, while continuing to stress
enforcement.

Incarceration alone may not be the answer, but it can provide a perfect
opportunity for the other critical elements: education, demand-reduction
and treatment.

It's a time when the 60 percent of inmates who are addicts have a better
chance of getting clean; when, as one former cocaine trafficker told
Herald-Leader reporter Sarah Vos, a jail sentence can become "a blessing."

Unfortunately, the recovery program which was that inmate's salvation could
die of lack of funding.

No one questions the value of the Hope Therapeutic Program. But the grants
that once funded it at the Fayette County jail have run out. And the Hope
Center, which runs the jail program as well as a shelter and programs for
the homeless, can no longer afford to keep it going.

City and state officials should, if necessary, dig deep to save the
program, to expand it to include female prisoners and to take it or other
drug-rehab programs to other county jails that have, all together, a
population of 6,400 inmates.

No comprehensive study of the program's recidivism rates has been
undertaken, but what is known is encouraging. In two years, 156 men have
completed at least two months of the four-month Hope program before
release, and only 13 have been rearrested in Fayette County.

Treatment may cost more in the beginning, but it's much cheaper in the long
run than prison and all the other costs of addiction and addiction-fueled
crime.

The futility of trying to incarcerate our way out of the drug problem was
nicely illustrated by a news article that appeared alongside the one about
the treatment program's funding woes.

Under an Owensboro dateline, we read that members of the illegal drug trade
have responded to Kentucky's crackdown on the availability of
methamphetamine ingredients by buying their supplies in other states.

Pence and the other members of his drug control assessment summit are right
when they say that we can never whip the drug crisis without drastically
reducing the demand for illegal drugs. And treating addicts and abusers
while they're in jail is one way to do that.