At the National Prescription Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit held this week in Atlanta, President Barack Obama reiterated something that mental health andcriminal justice reform advocates have been saying for years: drug abuse is a "public health problem and not a criminal problem.�
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), opioid drug deaths--primarily from prescription painkillers and heroin--more than quadrupledbetween 2000 and 2014, a year in which the nation saw nearly 30,000 deaths from opioid painkillers and heroin. In Oklahoma that year, 777 people losttheir lives to drug overdose.
And because of the skyrocketing addiction to prescription painkillers (and to heroin, which is often easier to obtain than prescription drugs), in manystates, drug overdose has now surpassed motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of accidental death.
All of this has happened in an era rooted in a "tough on crime" approach that peddled the idea that harsh criminal punishment for drug offenders was thesolution to addiction. Instead, the result has been a surge in addiction and drug deaths coupled with jails and prisons overcrowded with people whowould better be served by mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment.
President Obama called for a new approach to the "war on drugs:"
"For too long we�ve viewed drug addiction through the lens of criminal justice. The most important thing to do is reduce demand. And the only way to dothat is to provide treatment � to see it as a public health problem and not a criminal problem."
This shift cannot come soon enough.Approximately 50 percent of all federal inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses--some98,500 people. And that number only accounts for federal inmates convicted of drug crimes. It does not consider the number or people convicted of othercrimes with substance abuse at the root--theft or embezzlement, for example.
And that's just federal prisons. The majority of incarcerated people in the United States are housed in local jails and state prisons. Oklahoma has oneof the highest rates of incarceration in the nation; in fact, it has a higher incarceration rate of females than any other state. Again, a largepercentage of these men and women behind bars in Oklahoma are there because of drug offenses and crimes motivated by substance abuse issues.
The Obama administration has already made some headway in the decriminalization of drug crimes. Attorney General Eric Holder decried mandatory minimumsas "draconian" and said the federal government would no longer pursue them for low-level drug offenders. President Obama has commuted the sentencesof several drug offenders serving lengthy sentences. And now, he says that the real way to combat substance abuse and opioid addiction is not to prosecutethe addicts, but to treat them.
Of course, the initiatives suggested to combat drug addiction as a public health problem rather than a criminal problem take money--lots of it. And unfortunately,the funds have not been allocated to provide the resources to effectively combat substance abuse and mental health issues. Until legislators and thepublic get on board with treating addiction as a health problem rather than a crime, the "war on drugs" will continue to be a losing battle.
