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As much as I love putting people on blast, sometimes (who am I kidding, all the time) you come across a piece of information that is so disturbing and so ubiquitous that it is impossible to direct your frustration at just one individual. Believe me, I’d love to identify one culprit for the following fact but like most staggering facts associated with addiction, we need to dig deep to find the origin of the problem.
With that said, this week I found myself blown away by something other than how disturbing this whole healthcare reform is being handled. I was thinking about how this presidential, healthcare dog and pony show is such a disaster and how so many educated people out there are actually buying tickets to watch as the poodle jumps over the horse that I found myself scrambling to read something that would divert my attention. I grabbed the first thing I could get my hands on, which happened to be a piece written about correctional (what a misnomer) facilities and recidivism.
I know, not exactly the best ‘feel good’ material but anything is better than watching the healthcare shuffle! Regardless, one of the first things I read was discussing substance abuse in the prison systems and more importantly, the fact that as most of us in the addiction field know, the best way to limit recidivism (and save millions in taxpayer dollars) is to provide inmates with quality addiction treatment programs inside prisons and of equal importance, have continuation programs ready for them upon release. Then I read something that blew my mind, earlier this year, researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse estimated that about half of the 7.1 million Americans now locked up or on probation have some sort of addiction. But only one in five of those addicts receives effective treatment. That figure is beyond disturbing from the human standpoint, and painful from the taxpayer perspective.
“For every dollar that you spend on treatment of substance abuse in the criminal justice system, it saves society on average four dollars,” NIDA director Nora Volkow told Scientific American in January. Her review of the scientific literature showed that rehab programs behind bars are good at keeping prisoners from returning to drugs once they’re back on the streets. As an example, Volkow cited a prison program that treated heroin addicts with methadone. Addicts who received that treatment were seven times more likely than their unrehabbed peers to stay off heroin after their release, and three times more likely not to commit another offense.
Consider this, this year, hundreds of thousands of inmates have languished on the waiting list for their respective correctional facility’s in-house addiction-treatment program. They actually want help and know the answer but are not being afforded the opportunity, while taxpayer dollars are being squandered on things that infuriate me. Matters are darker for an addict outside of jail, on probation. It can take 4 – 20 weeks to get into a county probation department’s residential treatment program. In 20 weeks, an addict on the streets can find a lot of substances to abuse, a lot of crimes to commit, a lot of trouble to get into. Whether he ends up in the county emergency room or back in jail, the taxpayer will pick up the tab. Heroine addicts are dope sick in a matter of hours and for those of you who have never seen or experienced dope sickness, it would make your grandmother at least consider strong-armed robbery. Now ask someone who knows nothing but the streets to wait 20 weeks…good luck with that!
Listen, it isn’t just a way to keep things moving in the right direction, save lives and make the world a safer place, but it is also a whole lot cheaper to provide the troubled with treatment. We need to correct the corrections or this cycle will continue to get steeper. Think about all of this and share your thoughts with me…something needs to happen now!
