With the legalization of cannabis in Washington and Colorado going into effect this month, federal and state governments must reassess their strategies for dealing with drug abuse and addiction.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 22.6 million Americans have used illicit drugs in the last month; this equates to about 8.9 percent of the population aged 12 or older.

Yet, as a nation we continue to stigmatize and imprison those suffering from drug addiction. The Pioneer believes public policy should seek to rehabilitate, not incarcerate, substance dependent Americans.

Today, over half of federal inmates are incarcerated due to drug charges, according to a 2009 report by the Beckley Foundation, and figures are estimated by the foundation to have risen since then.

Court-mandated substance abuse programs are a step in the right direction, but are still not as effective as community-based health programs, the Drug Policy Alliance said in a report last year. While they sometimes show demonstrated results on an individual level, the public safety impact is not appreciable due to the tendency of courts to target low-level or first-time offenders with the ultimatum of rehab or prison.

California and the Bay Area already offer free and low-cost resources to people who want to get clean, many of whom receive funding from the state and federal governments.

But for reasons like stigmatization, only 2.6 million Americans – 11.2 percent of those who needed treatment – received it at a specialty facility, a 2010 SAMHSA study said.

The results of this approach to drug control are a prison system that is hemorrhaging funding and evidence that imprisonment is not an effective deterrent to drug abusers, not to mention the highest rates of imprisoned citizens of any country worldwide, nearly 500 for every 100,000.

Gil Kerlikowske, director of the National Drug Control Policy agrees that rehabilitating drug offenders is more effective in reducing crime than harsher sentences. As stated in an interview with Reuters, “These data confirm that we must address our drug problem as a public health issue, not just a criminal justice issue.”

Part of the problem lies in the popular perception of drug addicts as criminals lacking moral fortitude rather than as those suffering from a mental illness. However, many socioeconomic factors, as well as environmental, cultural and even biological predispositions all affect a person’s likelihood of becoming an addict.

Regardless of ethnicity, research shows the highest rates of substance abusers “reside in metropolitan areas with populations greater than 1 million; lack health insurance coverage; are unemployed; have 9 to 11 years of schooling; or have never been married,” and that “adolescents who dropped out of school or who reside in households with fewer than two biological parents have relatively high prevalence of past-year use of cigarettes, alcohol, and illicit drugs,” according to SAMHSA.

Children of addicts are eight times as likely to abuse substances later in life, one study says; and over six million children in America currently live with at least one parent who has a drug addiction, says another.

While personal responsibility for crime always rests on the criminal, studies suggest addiction is due to equal parts genetic predisposition and poor coping skills.

Other diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer are similarly caused in part by genetic makeup and in part by lifestyle, but addiction still falls into a separate category.

Substance abusers should be viewed by our society and treated by our governmental bodies in the same way as those suffering from any of these diseases, but instead we castigate them as junkies, crack heads, drunks and fiends.

Instead of thinking of them as drug addicts, The Pioneer suggests we should start thinking of them as people who suffer from drug addiction: to emphasize they are people first, and they are stuck in a state in which most of us hope to never find ourselves.

People recovering from substance dependency need the compassion of society, not to become embroiled in a broken criminal justice system.

If governments want to reduce drug-related crime, the way to approach the problem is through community-based, demonstrated health and prevention programs.