HuffPo | I
n 1971, Richard Nixon declared
drug abuse “America’s public enemy number one.” Over the next three
decades, the federal government and most states toughened their drug
laws and began spending ever more to put offenders in prison and keep
them there. Today, there are
neighborhoods where nearly everyone
knows people
who have been behind bars, and the enforcement of the drug laws across
racial lines is so uneven that the United States locks up
a higher percentage of black men than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. Drugs are
purer and cheaper than they were in the '90s, and the demand for them is overwhelming authorities’ ability to combat the problem. Prison wardens are
filling gyms and television rooms with bunk beds. Officials in both parties and at every level of the government complain about the cost of keeping so many people locked up.
In
recent years, some states have saved money on prisons by investing more
heavily in “drug courts” where judges can order defendants to enroll in
treatment programs. Every state in the country has at least a few drug
courts; Washington alone has dozens. In the simplest sense, these courts
offer people an opportunity to avoid prison, provided they agree to
stop using all illegal drugs and go into a treatment program ordered by a
judge.
Studies suggest that
they can help addicted people break their habits. But people with the
toughest addictions often drop out or fail to qualify in the first
place, and even those who manage to get "clean" still have to live with
the permanent stain of a criminal record.
In Seattle’s West
Precinct, where Bradford lives, the approach is different. People who
get arrested for the sale and possession of crack, heroin and other
illegal drugs are no longer automatically thrown in jail and prosecuted.
Instead, officers with the Seattle Police Department now have the
option of giving these offenders a choice: leave the precinct the
old-fashioned way, in handcuffs, or meet with a counselor at a
social-service agency and avoid the court system altogether.
Those
who choose the second path are no longer offenders, but “clients.”
Depending on their needs, they may receive free apartments, clean
clothes, college tuition, books for school or even yoga classes.
Counselors lead them through a bureaucratic maze, helping them apply for
jobs, food stamps, health insurance and other essentials. Private
foundations shoulder most of the costs, though the city has begun to
chip in, too. All the clients have to do to get into the program is
agree to see a counselor at least twice in the first month of signing
up. They don’t have to promise to stop using drugs. No one hands them a
cup and points them to the bathroom.
The underlying philosophy is
known as “harm reduction.” Proponents believe in trying to rein in the
secondary effects of drug addiction -- social ills like poverty and
homelessness and physical diseases like HIV -- by supporting people who
are either unwilling or unable to stop using drugs. The idea has always
been controversial, particularly in the United States, with critics
arguing that the best way to address addiction is to insist on total
abstinence from drugs at every stage of the recovery process.
Nevertheless, government-backed programs that practice the principles of
harm reduction are spreading throughout the country and the world, in
part because the unimpeded growth of the drug trade has made it
increasingly difficult for governments to justify the traditional ways
of dealing with addiction.
In Canada,
Australia, and many European cities, addicts can now get their fixes in
legally sanctioned injection rooms under the supervision of nurses who
have been trained to protect against overdoses. Syringe exchanges, where
people can trade dirty needles for clean ones, have sprung up in most
American states and in
more than 70 countries.
Since 2001, the government of Portugal has treated the possession of a
personal supply of drugs as a minor offense on par with a parking
violation. When the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank,
looked into the effects of this policy in 2009,
it found that fewer kids were using drugs in their teens and that the
HIV infection rate among drug users had dropped substantially.
In
the United States, police departments in some cities have taken small
steps toward reconciling the old-school approach with one that
prioritizes the health and safety of drug users. In Washington, D.C.,
for example, the police chief has ordered officers to
comply with a new law that bars them from arresting people who call 911 to report an overdose.
Yet
Seattle may be the only city in America where the police have departed
so sharply from the status quo. Judith Greene, the director of Justice
Strategies, a nonprofit research group that studies criminal justice
reform, said she couldn’t think of another example of police arresting
people for the purpose of “giving them a pathway to a new life.”
Although
it's still too soon to tell whether Seattle's strategy will pay off in
the long run, the program, called Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, or
LEAD, is already attracting interest from police departments and
prosecutors’ offices around the country. San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta
and Houston have all sent representatives to Seattle to take notes,
according to the program’s administrators. Santa Fe recently adopted the
model for people arrested for heroin and prescription opiates, and
Albany, New York, is expected to launch a similar program this year. In
Seattle, the effort has already helped dozens of people like Bradford
get access to services that can temper the effects of addiction. In a
society that still insists on treating drug addicts as criminals, the
city is trying to use that criminalization to direct addicted people to
services that might actually help them.
