The Obama drug strategy

[babylonsister]

The Obama drug strategy
by Mark Kleiman

snip//


But the strategy offers a fairly impressive list of innovations to set off against those disappointments. Of course the ones that matter most to me testing-and-sanctions programs for drug-involved offenders (which the “formidable” Bennett and McCaffrey never dared to endorse) and David Kennedy’s Drug Market Intervention program designed to eliminate problematic drug markets without mass arrests. Together, those two programs alone would radically reduce the links between drugs and crime, and yet because they’re neither “supply” or “demand” programs and have no visceral appeal to either side of the culture wars, they’ve struggled to get attention.

Rather than just promising to pump more money into the existing drug-treatment machinery, the strategy focuses on on the contribution the mainstream health-care effort could make toward dealing with substance abuse, in particular screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT). The money potentially available for his purpose under the health care bill, and in particular through the community clinic system, dwarfs the formal treatment system. The strategy aims to make sure that potential gets used; if it does, the effective balance between “supply” and “demand” spending would shift radically in fact, though it wouldn’t change on paper.

Some of the innovations don’t leap off the page, but require a little bit of reading between the lines; they’re important nonetheless.

= “Provide information on effective prevention strategies to law enforcement” seems anodyne until you think about it. Right now, law enforcement is heavily invested in a single, ineffective prevention strategy: DARE, one of the sacred cows of drug abuse control. The implication is that the Feds are going to tell law enforcement agencies with information on programs that actually work.

= “Celebrate and support recovery from addiction” also sounds like an endorsement of motherhood and apple pie, until you scroll down and see “Review laws and regulations that impede recovery,” which turns out to mean getting rid of all the mean-spirited laws that deny driver’s licenses, housing, and student loans to people with drug convictions.

= “Prevention-prepared communities” turns out to mean replacing the plethora of boutique “prevention” programs aimed at specific behaviors such as drug-taking with generic programs aimed at addressing the community and personal roots of foolish and anti-social behavior. (For example, a classroom-discipline exercise called the Good Behavior Game, which never mentions drugs, is more effective at preventing early initiation of drug use than any drug-focused program.)

snip//

Is this the strategy that I would have written? Not by a long shot. But is it the best strategy produced since the process started in 1989? Incomparably. It deserved better treatment than Newsweek chose to give it. What it shows is a White House that has gotten over the “drug war” and is ready to think about managing the drug problem.

more...

http://www.samefacts.com/2010/05/drug-policy/the-obama-drug-strategy/

[Cha]

1. Thank goodness we have the internet

and don't have to rely on corporate media like newsweek to give us a comprehensive report on "The Obama drug strategy".

Of course Pres Obama and Team are ready to manage it.

[Clio the Leo]

2. Kick! NT

[PM Martin]

3. kick

[Hekate]

4. KnR