Effective drug treatment

Thirty-eight physicians meeting last summer at the New York Academy of Sciences agreed with the majority of Americans that the War on Drugs was a failure and that the country needed a fundamental shift in its ilicit-drug policy. They formed a group called Physician Leadership on National Drug Policy and this week began what will be a long campaign toward changing how illicit-drug users are treated.

The doctors’ work is in part humanitarian, part reality check and part multi-billion-dollar savings over the current system. Succinctly, according to the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the physicians found that illicit-drug addiction is a chronic medical condition that can be treated with the same success rate of diabetes, asthma or hypertension. The average cost of treating drug addicts, they found, is about one-tenth of putting them in prison.

The physicians analyzed 600 peer-reviewed articles to draw their conclusion. They also discovered that, while the public hasn’t much faith in the War on Drugs, the majority of people are interested in seeing illicit-drug users penalized and view the connection between drug use and crime as serious. Not so serious, however, that it has generated an outcry to treat drug users so they change their behavior.

Though it is not said explicitly, the physicians imply that the continued vilification of drug abusers interferes with effective treatment strategies to persuade the abusers to become former abusers. Thus, if a state is spending its money to build more cells, it is not spending it to treat the prisoners it already has. Yet the evidence to do so is at least provocative. Compliance rates for treatments for illicit drug-use were just under 40 percent. As a comparision, they are less than 50 percent for insulin-dependent diabetes; and less than 30 percent for hypertension and asthma.

Another way to think about treatment is to ask what happens when it is not offered. About 60 percent of the 1.7 million men and women in U.S. prisons have been sentenced for drug-law violations. The average annual cost for each prisoner is $25,900. More than $26 billion a year to hold prisoners who could be treated relatively cheaply and eventually released to a far better chance of not going back prison.

That cost alone makes the physicians’ campaign worth waging.