TREATMENT OPTION

To the editor:

Thank you for publishing Mike Belt's timely article on sentencing drug
offenders to drug treatment instead of jail.

I wanted to correct one misquote however. I said, "there are only a small
percentage of drug users who ARE addicted" not who "aren't" addicted. The
government estimates there are some 40-50 million regular users of illegal
drugs in this country, of whom only 10 percent may meet the criteria for
addiction. The other 90 percent don't even need treatment, much less
incarceration.

The Rand Corp. found that treatment is 10 times more effective at reducing
cocaine use than interdiction, that domestic law enforcement efforts cost
15 times as much as treatment to achieve the same reduction in societal
costs (incarceration, lost productivity, violence), that every dollar
invested in drug treatment saves $7.46 in societal costs. In addition, drug
treatment has been found to reduce welfare use by 10 percent and to
increase employment rates by 18 percent in one year.

People across the political spectrum are advocating for a change in our
drug policy. A solid majority of Americans favors prioritizing treatment
over incarceration, yet our government spends only 7 percent of its drug
control budget on treatment. The other 93 percent is spent on interdiction,
source control, and law enforcement. Hopefully, with more articles such as
the one you published Monday, we can start to reverse these percentages.

Sheldon Whitten-Vile, M.D.,

Lawrence