This is a mistake. I know from my own experience with addiction that legal consequences can play an essential role in pushing people toward a path to recovery.
The case for decriminalization rests on two key arguments: First, the war on drugs isn’t working. The prohibition of hard drugs, advocates argue, hasn’t prevented the opiate crisis, which keeps getting worse. Hundreds of thousands of arrests and prosecutions each year seem fruitless. Second, the enormous resources of time and money we pour into prohibition could be much better spent on education and treatment for addicts. If addiction is a disease, then why don’t we treat it like one, instead of prosecuting it like a crime?
These arguments might seem compelling. But the case for decriminalization ultimately depends on repressing an inconvenient truth: Treatment for addiction is not as effective as proponents say it is.
Yes, treatment can be effective. But as the saying goes, recovery is for people who want it, not for people who need it. It typically takes years of treatment to achieve recovery, and one study estimates that between 40 and 60 percent of people discharged for addiction treatment relapse within a year. A more encouraging study found that nearly 75 percent of people who reported experiencing a substance-use problem said they were in recovery, but large portions of them also reported drug or alcohol use in the past year.
Recovery is so hard because, unlike the treatment for many other diseases, addiction treatment works only if those receiving it accept the need to give up drugs and commit to a far-reaching personal transformation. Medications such as buprenorphine alone can’t create this commitment. Many of us with loved ones still in the grips of addiction have found ourselves asking what it will take to get them to admit they need to change.
For me and for nearly every other person recovering from addiction I know, it took arrest and prosecution. When I was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and charged with felony possession of heroin, my first feeling was an enormous sense of relief. Over the previous years, I tried everything to stop using. I’d taken buprenorphine, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs. I’d tried therapy, exercise, meditation. I’d tried moving, changing friends, switching drugs. I’d checked myself into at least a dozen rehabs. I knew everything there was to know about the 12 steps, peer support and abstinence.
Nothing worked. When I was high, all I could think about was getting clean. As soon as the drugs wore off, all I could think about was how to get more drugs. With enormous effort, I sometimes won periods of freedom from heroin — a month, six weeks, six months. But I always ended up strung-out again. Nothing could stop me from using.
Nothing but the law. I believe that my arrest saved my life. Through a court-mandated treatment program, I began my road to recovery. I recently celebrated 21 years of being clean.
What was missing from my earlier attempts at recovery was motivation. Sooner or later, I’d say, “to hell with this recovery crap.” And I’d get high again. My legal consequences gave me the motivation to recover. Even while kicking heroin on the jail cell floor, I felt relieved. No more hiding. I had to try something new.
This doesn’t necessarily mean putting drug users in prison. I never went to prison, as is the case for most people with addiction. In fact, contrary to what many proponents of decriminalization suggest, fewer than 15 percent of inmates of state prisons are incarcerated because of nonviolent drug crimes. For many users who have a brush with the law, court-mandated treatment and the threat of worse outcomes in the future are enough to set them on the right track.
People who haven’t experienced the unbelievable compulsion to use drugs find it easy to accept the assumption that if we shift the resources we pour into enforcement into treatment, addiction will become manageable. But in many cases — such as mine — treatment becomes effective only when the addict faces the cataclysmic shock of arrest.
I have no wish to minimize the costs of incarceration or the abuse and suffering that many of us encounter in the criminal justice system. But my more than 20 years of experience in recovery lead me to believe that decriminalization would make our addiction epidemic worse.
I’m sure many people who want to help people suffering from addiction wish this weren’t the case. But when it comes to drugs and addiction, there are no easy solutions.
