Newsweek and other national newsmagazines regularly announce that we are on the verge of scientifically solving addiction (and alcoholism, mental illness, et al.). Although the pictures of brain scans are getting better, so far, the cover stories haven't been right. In February of this year, Newsweek, building on excitement around the film "Traffic," added to the normal Pollyanna science feature a drug policy reform platform which says that treatment — although not based on any of the scientific breakthroughs discussed — will solve our drug problems. What is "amusing" is how Barry McCaffrey and other drug warriors have learned to co-opt the drug reform platform that we should treat people — for the crime of drug use.

DPFT News (newsletter of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas), February, 2001, pp. 1; 3-4

The New Consensus—"Treat 'em or Jail 'em" —Is Worse than the Old

Stanton Peele
Morristown, NJ

A liberal consensus is emerging that American drug policy is wrong-headed in as much as it emphasizes interdiction and criminal prosecution of users, and that it should focus on treatment of drug abusers. This consensus is apparent in the cover of the February 12 Newsweek, "Fighting Addiction," and embraces the Steven Sonderbergh film "Traffic" and the recent victory of Proposition 36 in California. But this new consensus in fact recycles outdated and disproved notions, is fundamentally reactionary and antagonistic towards drug users, and stands no chance of reversing either the extent of drug abuse in America or the repression of drug use and users.

A series of linking stories in Newsweek indicated broad agreement on the fundamental tenets of how we should approach drug use in the United States. The lead story, "Abuse in America: The War on Addiction," by Jonathan Alter, opened with a reference to "Traffic." The subtitle for this story was: "Fresh Research and Shifting Views of Treatment Are Opening New Fronts in a Deadly Struggle." According to a banner across the body of the story, "Even hard-liners in the war on drugs like to say that we can no longer incarcerate our way out of the problem." Barry McCaffrey is a part of the new consensus. McCaffrey, it seems, believes that "the phrase 'drug war' should be retired in favor of 'drug cancer.' The straight-talking military man has little to say about interdiction. His No. 1 recommendation on leaving office last month was that insurance companies offer the same level of coverage for mental-health and drug disorders as they do for any other illness."

Yet, in practical terms, this consensus rejects the forward-looking harm reduction approaches practiced throughout much of the rest of the Western World, including needle exchange and methadone therapy. "Even so," Alter intoned, "a 'third way' consensus between liberals and conservatives is emerging, especially at the local level where the real money is spent." This third way "combines flexible enforcement with mandatory treatment." The epitome of this approach in these articles are the drug courts which have emerged across the United States. According to Alter, "Drug-court judges use carrots (gift certificates; the promise of fewer court dates) and sticks (return to jail) to change behavior."

It is in this regards that Newsweek exposed the first word of opposition to the new consensus. Oddly, it came from Ethan Nadelmann, architect of California's Proposition 36. Alter stated, "Drug-policy reformers like Ethan Nadelman of the Lindesmith Center don't buy the approach: 'Alcoholics don't have coerced treatment,' Nadelman says. 'So why should drug abusers?' " Ethan faced a number of problems in the article and in his statement (in addition to the misspelling of his name, which was apparently too European for Newsweek editors). Alcoholics — and a host of others — are regularly forced into alcoholism treatment in the United States — according to my recent book with Charles Bufe and Archie Brodsky, Resisting 12-Step Coercion, 1.5 million people a year face this fate.

Indeed, America keeps in place the largest private and public substance abuse treatment system in the world with regard to alcohol almost wholly by coercion. Drunk drivers and other probationers, parents, employees, social service recipients, prison inmates, doctors, pilots, nurses and other professional license bearers, et al. are all forced into alcoholism treatment as a matter of course — even where the person's alcoholism is questionable (as it is for many drunk drivers and parents accused of alcohol abuse by a divorcing spouse) and even though state coercion of people into 12-step treatment (virtually the only kind available) has been ruled unconstitutional by every higher court which has considered the practice.

Most important, the consensus announced by Newsweek that drug use must be treated out of people continues the fundamental orientation of Americans towards drugs as an irresistible but nonetheless reprehensible, punishable, and remediable affliction.

The Treatable Disease

Newsweek links the new consensus to fresh scientific discoveries: according to Alter, "In an attempt to break the vicious cycle, drug addiction is increasingly being viewed more as a disease than a crime." But Alter has missed a few centuries in American history. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Rush, the American physician who signed the Declaration of Independence, claimed that drunkards and inebriates (not then called alcoholics) were suffering from a disease. By the mid-nineteenth century, the temperance movement had popularized this idea and a large proportion of Americans (although few immigrants) viewed chronic drunkenness as a disease. The modern treatment movement has largely obscured the degree to which temperance views and those of Alcoholics Anonymous coalesce in regarding alcoholism as an inexorable and irreversible process that can be halted only by complete abstinence.