Daily Beast - Want to end the war on drugs? Lobby your local police department. They’ve quietly had the power to end the whole thing this entire time—and some are doing just that.
Sick of an opioid overdose crisis that had killed four people in his town of 30,000 since the first of January, Gloucester, Massachusetts Police Chief Leonard Campanello wanted to make certain he didn’t have to investigate another one.
Starting on June 1 in Gloucester, any addict who walks into his police station seeking help will get it—and they won’t face charges. They’ll be assigned an “angel,” like a sponsor, to help them through the transition. And nasal Narcan, which helps in the immediate aftermath of an overdose, is being made available at potentially no cost without prescription or insurance. Campanello swung a deal with a local CVS to make it happen.
“The reasons for the difference in care between a tobacco addict and an opiate addict is stigma and money,” he wrote. “Petty reasons to lose a life.”
Campanello wants to fix the drug problem in his city, not punish those who fell victim to it.
It’s now been 44 years since Richard Nixon declared he would “wage a new, all-out offensive” on drug abuse in what many called the beginning of the War on Drugs. In Massachusetts last year, more than 1,000 people died of opioid overdoses alone—an increase of 33 percent from three years prior.
“Police departments have started to realize through the years that, from a policing perspective, what they were doing simply wasn’t working,” Leo Beletsky, an assistant professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, told The Daily Beast.
“We are seeing this as de facto decriminalization,” says Kris Nyrop. “Local government and police departments really do have the power to make phenomenal changes that could chip away at the drug war. I had no idea how much prosecutorial discretion existed before we started LEAD and am consistently impressed.”
LEAD is the Seattle-based Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, and it’s a way to use that prosecutorial discretion to get those busted for drug abuse help without ever affecting the user’s rap sheet. It's still operating on a pilot basis, but it goes like this:
“Your officer can tell the guy, ‘Door Number 1 is the King County Jail. Door Number 2 is case management,’” says Nyrop, a public defender who is LEAD’s program director. “Then, if they pick the second one, it’s a direct hand off straight from the officer to the case manager. They are then officially in LEAD. Totally harm-free, and the person who needs help doesn’t have to plead guilty first to get it.”
... LEAD members are 60 percent less likely to reoffend. The real test, however, might come in the next part of the trial: a cost-offset analysis to see how much LEAD is really costing. In America, the drug war is a $51 billion-per-year gambit, and private prisons take in $3.3 billion of that money annually. So LEAD needs to not only work—it needs to be cheap, too.
“We’re seeing early on that doing LEAD costs less,” says Nyrop. “The results aren’t in yet, but we’re very hopeful. Especially if you brought it to scale, it can cost less. You can close down a facility, or a wing of a jail.
No comments:
Post a Comment